Alvin Hilaire, from left, chief economist, Central Bank; Dominic Stoddard, senior economist research department, Central Bank; Keston Nancoo, vice-chairman, Employers Consultative Association (ECA), at a breakfast meeting at the Crowne Plaza, Port-of-Spain, yesterday. Photo: Keith Matthews

The Central Bank intends to establish new systems of informing the public on its economic data, said Alvin Hilaire, chief economist at the Central Bank. “We would be working very hard over the next nine months on this project.

The Central Bank, in co-ordination with Central Statistical Office (CSO) and Ministry of Finance, is going to set a new standard for disseminating statistics and data,” he said. Hilaire was speaking to a group of business people yesterday at a seminar organised by the Employers Consultative Association (ECA) at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Port-of-Spain. “Basically, it is going towards the International Monetary Fund (IMF) special data dissemination standards. In 1996, the IMF launched an important initiative whereby the countries that have access to international capital markets would commit themselves to producing a certain level of data,” he said.

Hilaire described this project as serious. “It would be a certain coverage of data, a lot of financial data and data on the economy like balance of payments and so on, but also produced in a certain regularity, like daily, weekly, monthly. It must also be produced in a timely fashion. So once you commit to that, it’s a strong undertaking,” he said. Hilaire said the data would be made available to everyone. “It also means the data must be accessible to the public, businesses, investors, international community, and they must be able to access that data always,” he said.

He said there will be many benefits for this new system of releasing data.“First, there would be transparency. It would mean in T&T, information would be widely disseminated, and there would be a certain level of transparency in the information, which is important in the modern world so people would know what is the balance of payments and so on. There would be no secrets,” he said. He said another benefit could be a lower cost of international borrowing. “It could lower our cost of funds, the cost at which we borrow at from the international community.

In being transparent, in the rate of interest, it could lower your cost of funds. Borrowing at lower rates would be beneficial to us,” he said. “It implies a lot of institutional maturity and institutional building because it’s not a trivial enterprise. You’d have to have the CSO, the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank with statistical capacity being ready to be beefed up, and you would have to pour some resources into that,” he said.