The official site of Italy's central bank

Main activities

Statistics

Article 5 of the Statute of the ESCB/ECB states that the ECB, assisted by the NCBs, shall collect, from the competent national authorities or directly from economic agents, the statistical information necessary for the conduct of monetary policy in the euro area and for the performance of the other tasks of the ESCB.

Council Regulation (EC) No 2533/98 sets out who may be subject to reporting requirements, the provisions for enforcement and the confidentiality regime. The ECB imposes reporting obligations mainly by means of regulations and guidelines. The legal acts are prepared by the Statistics Committee (STC), assisted by the Legal Committee (LEGCO), and adopted by the Governing Council of the ECB. Each new request for data or substantial modification of existing requirements is first subject to a detailed cost/benefit analysis.

In the provision of statistics, the Eurosystem and the ESCB work closely with the European Community institutions, in particular Eurostat, as well as with the national statistical institutes and relevant national and international organizations. They contribute to the development and dissemination of international standards. At the European level, the terms of cooperation with the European Commission (Eurostat) and the respective areas of responsibility are laid out in a memorandum of understanding on economic and financial statistics, revised in March 2003. The ECB has prime responsibility for money, banking and financial markets statistics, international reserves statistics, statistics on the nominal and real effective exchange rates of the euro, and quarterly financial accounts for the euro area. The European Commission has prime responsibility for general economic statistics. Responsibility is shared for balance of payments statistics, the development of quarterly non-financial accounts by institutional sector and data transmission standards. The European Commission has prime responsibility for the annual accounts of the Member States broken down by sector.

The legal acts relating to the statistical activities of the ECB and the ESCB, together with the text of the memorandum of understanding, can be found on the ECB’s website at the address below.

In the production of statistics, the NCBs collect data from the reporting sources and prepare the indicators for their respective countries. These are then transmitted to the ECB, which compiles the aggregates for the euro area. The dissemination of the data also involves close cooperation between the members of the Eurosystem. As a rule, the ECB is responsible for disseminating euro area statistics, while the NCBs disseminate the corresponding national data. In order to make it easy for the public to find and display the whole range of data available, an application has been developed via which euro area aggregates and the corresponding national breakdowns can be obtained for a selection of the main harmonized statistics. The application can be accessed from the websites of all the Eurosystem central banks.