Banking and Monetary Statistics

This handbook covers mainly the financial data which are relevant to understanding monetary conditions in the economy and which are important evidence for the development of the economy more generally. But the handbook mentions also the other supervisory, structural, operational and administrative data that many central banks collect. The various needs for financial data, and the concepts and data-sets used to meet these needs, are outlined in section 2, other detailed definitional issues and practical problems in meeting the definitions are discussed in section 3, and the practicalities of compiling and disseminating the statistics in section 4. The handbook is based around the international statistical standards set by the IMF and other international organisations. Throughout, a brief description of the current UK system is given as an illustration of how the needs and problems are addressed there. However, we have also included examples of practice in a selected number of other countries, so as to provide a wider perspective. These countries include Japan, Latvia, Thailand, USA and the Euro area. This handbook is also available in Arabic and Spanish.