MANU/RPRL/0112/2017

Ministry : Reserve Bank of India

Department/Board : RBI

Press Release No. : 2017-2018/57

Date : 06.07.2017

Referred IN

RBI discusses New Frontiers on Statistical Methods and Information Base at its 11th Statistics Day Conference

The Reserve Bank celebrated its '11th Annual Statistics Day Conference' on July 04, 2017 on the Theme 'New Frontiers on Statistical Methods and Information Base for Central Banks'. The Statistics Day Conference is an annual feature in the Reserve Bank's calendar after the Government of India designated the birthday of (Late) Prof. P. C. Mahalanobis as the "Statistics Day", in 2007. Distinguished academicians and practitioners participated in the Conference.

In his inaugural address, Dr. Urjit R. Patel, Governor, highlighted the momentous contribution made by Prof. Mahalanobis in the field of theoretical and applied statistics and his exemplary role in development of the Indian statistical system. The Governor observed that there is a continuous effort to improve measurement, modelling and prediction of economic outcomes and developments. He stressed the "information base" part of the theme of the Conference since the collection and analysis of detailed data aid in designing better targeted responses in a variety of settings in practice and policy. The Governor also acknowledged that the present times are interesting for economic analysis and it is useful to deliberate and reflect on key areas of special interest such as understanding global spill-over effects, estimating and forecasting in the presence of high volatility and structural breaks, analysing the impact of macroeconomic developments on distributional aspects, developing new information bases, and optimising the available information to improve the robustness of estimates.

Dr. Viral V. Acharya, Deputy Governor delivered the Theme Talk: A Case for Public Credit Registry in India. He noted that statistical techniques are an integral part of economic analysis and this fact is also reflected in the good share of "method awards" in the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Dr. Acharya said that India's progress has been quite satisfactory under the G20 Data Gap Initiatives towards collection of better information and improved measurement of the build-up of risk in the financial sector, cross-border financial linkages, and vulnerability of domestic economies to shocks. As his primary message, Dr. Acharya emphasised the need for setting up a Public Credit Registry - an extensive database of credit information - for analysing, addressing and preventing in future the twin balance-sheet problems of banking and corporate sector. Reviewing the supervisory and statistical databases relating to bank credit, he said that linking them with financial results of the corporate sector and employing unique borrower-level identifiers could lead to incisive research and insights on monetary policy transmission to the real economy. The creation of a large public credit registry will help the supe........