Page 26 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS178 Kuniko M.
1. Introduction
Economic and financial statistics form the basis of assessments and
forecasts of economic and financial conditions. Ongoing improvement in the
quality of these statistics is essential for policymakers, including central banks,
to conduct their policies appropriately. For these statistics, the Bank of Japan
takes on two roles, each with a different perspective — as a compiler and user
of statistics. As a compiler of statistics such as the producer price indexes for
goods and services, the flow of funds account, and the Tankan (Short-Term
Economic Survey of Enterprises in Japan), the Bank is continuously working to
improve the quality of its statistics. At the same time, the Bank uses a wide
range of statistics in making policy decisions. This paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 presents the Bank’s activities as a compiler of statistics. The
Bank communicates with users of the statistics it compiles. On the process of
recent substantial revisions of the Services Producer Price Index (SPPI) and the
Tankan, communications with users will be explained in detail as examples.
Then, Section 3 explains the Bank’s experience of improvements in statistics
which are brought about by a synergy between statistics compilers and users.
The Bank’s contributions to the government’s statistics reform are also
presented. Section 4 concludes the paper.

2. The Bank’s communications with users of its statistics
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) compiles a variety of statistics, such as financial
statistics, price indexes, and the Tankan, which indicates corporate sentiment.
When the Bank makes substantial revisions to its statistics, it announces the
changes in advance. By doing so, the Bank ensures a broad range of users and
reporting entities can provide comments and opinions, in line with the third
item of “The Basic Principles for the Compilation, Release, and Development
of Statistics” (hereafter referred to as the Basic Principles) published in 2009.
In the following sections, we introduce the Basic Principles and their
background, and then the communications with users which took place when
substantial revisions were being made to the Services Producer Price Index
(SPPI) and the Tankan are presented as examples.

2-1. Basic Principles for statistics at the Bank of Japan
The Basic Principles outline the Bank’s basic principles for the compilation
of statistics and form a quality assurance system. The principles cover various
aspects of statistics management across seven categories, as in Table 1. The
motivation to compile the Basic Principles was from the first comprehensive
revision of the Statistics Act (Act No.18 of 1947) in 60 years, which promoted
an improvement in convenience for users and in transparency.

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