1 The BIS-IMF-OECD-World Bank Joint External Debt Hub Presentation by Ibrahim Levent, Development Data Group, WB René Piché, Statistics Department, IMF Towards Implementation of SDMX January 9-11, 2007 World Bank, Washington D.C.

2 Joint External Debt Hub To pool a limited set of resources in the sponsoring institutions on a learn-by-doing basis To yield tangible benefits: –Implement SDMX standards –Ensure that the standards have real practical relevance by focusing on a specific subject-matter domain –Demonstrate the efficiency, cost-saving, and viability of common standards for data (and metadata) exchange –Broader goal: develop cross-domain guidelines and tools

3 External Debt Statistics Prior to JEDH Cross-country Data Available from two Websites: (1) Website maintained by the WB disseminating external debt data from national sources –Dynamic website (online database) providing quarterly external debt data based on the requirements of the IMF Special Data Dissemination Standard –Data submitted by 56 countries using standard report forms –Available at

4 External Debt Statistics Prior to JEDH (2) (2) Data on creditor and market sources provided by four contributing international agencies (BIS- IMF-OECD-WB) Data were disseminated on a website maintained by the OECD, which involved many steps: –provision of data files (in different formats); –processing of the files (one by one); –generating and posting static website tables

5 The JEDH Brings the two sites under a single umbrella to facilitate the comparison of external debt data compiled by countries (national sources) with data available from creditor and market sources Facilitates the exchange of the data – updates to the website and extractions from the website – by using the SDMX standards

6 The JEDH (2) Adopting a standard format for the exchange of external debt data – to use SDMX-ML Agreeing on how to package the data exchanged using SDMX-ML – to develop a “Data Structure Definition” for external debt Reducing human intervention in the process of the data exchange – to implement the “SDMX Registry” and develop the “SDMX agent”

7 Format for Data Exchange Technical specifications provided in the SDMX standards include the data packaging structure – the data structure definition Debtor country Debt instrument (loan) Time period Frequency Observation Value Unit (currency) Unit Multiplier Observation Status

8 Data Structure Definition for the JEDH The JEDH Project Team worked with the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics (TFFS) to –Agree on the concepts included in the DSD for exchanging external debt –Agree on the code lists for each of these concepts The TFFS approved the Data Structure Definition for the JEDH

9 SDMX “Registry” SDMX Registry implemented on an OECD server SDMX Registry for JEDH EXD data: creditor and market sources BIS: SDMX-ML IMF: SDMX-ML OECD: SDMX-ML World Bank: SDMX-ML BIS site IMF site OECD site WB site Get EXD data access to EXD data DB SDMX “Agent” WB webservice

10 creditor/market data sdmx-ml URLs national data DDPDDP SQLSQL

11

12 Demo

13 Final thoughts: The challenge will now be to assist international and national agencies in the implementation of the SDMX framework, at the technical as well as the content-oriented level. SDMX Sponsoring Organizations will be working with their respective international groups to take this forward and all interested parties are invited to actively contribute to the further development of the SDMX framework as well as to its implementation.

14 Questions

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27