José Luis Escrivá chairs the meeting of The Network of EU IFIs in Bratislava

23/11/2018 José Luis Escrivá chairs the meeting of The Network of EU IFIs in Bratislava on 23 November 2018. The main issue on the agenda was the initiation of transition to a new leadership. The current leadership has been exercising stewardship of the Network for the past three years. The duration of their national mandates, however, constrain their ability to take the Network further beyond the current two-period term ending 2019. The Network, therefore, started discussing the best way to ensure it has well-resourced leadership that will maintain continuity in the agenda beyond 2019. The Network also took note of the excellent work done at the technical level by its Output Gap Working Group. The first output of its longer-term agenda is now available as a working paper. In the afternoon, the Network held a workshop focussed on nowcasting – a set of analytical techniques increasingly used by IFIs in their day-to-day work with macroeconomic and fiscal data. An inherent aspect of working with data is that they are published sometimes with considerable delay. In their evaluation work, however, IFIs need to have a good understanding of the current state of the world and the short-term risks. The Network welcomed Jasper McMahon of Now-Casting Economics Ltd. who provided an introductory overview of the usefulness of the latest nowcasting techniques. Laura Coroneofrom the University of York presented an application of nowcasting methods to interest rate projections. Jacopo Cimadomo from the European Central Bank demonstrated how nowcasting can be applied to fiscal data. The presentations by external guests were complemented with short talks by IFIs on their experience with macroeconomic nowcasting (UPB, AIReF, IFAC and CFP) and working with real-time fiscal data (OBR, CBR).