BSP doing comprehensive review of data gathering, surveillance methods

GMA Network

6 days ago

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said Friday it is doing a comprehensive review of its economic data gathering and surveillance methodology to make its monetary policy stance and actions more responsive and timely.
At a press chat in Manila, BSP Deputy Governor for Monetary and Economics Sector Zeno Abenoja told reporters that the central bank is recalibrating its surveys —such as the quarterly Consumer Expectation Survey (CES) and Business Expectation Survey (BES) — this year to integrate 'soft data' or 'granular details that can help us understand the hard data that we get.'
Soft data, Abenoja said, include 'sentiment analysis on what people think… what prices will be over the near term, analysis on what could be driving their sentiment on inflation.'
'The consumer expectations and the business expectations survey, we think it will continue to be part of our core set of surveys on sentiment by the households and the businesses. We are reviewing it. We are reviewing the instruments. It's part of the regular review of the instrument. We want to improve the ease of filling up or getting more information. So we want it to be more streamlined while not sacrificing the information that we are able to gather,' the BSP official said.
'We are also reviewing the content itself if it is still relevant or if we need to add a few more questions on that,' he added.
The CES and BES capture the outlook and sentiment of consumers and the business sector on the country's economic condition, providing the central bank data on both consumption and business activities to guide its conduct of monetary actions.
'So we're trying to improve a lot of things at the central bank including our ability to monitor what's happening on the ground real time and what it means going forward. It is important for several reasons. One, we want to make whatever policy recommendation we give to the Monetary Board be based on more solid information, more current information. At the same time we want to do more early warning exercises. So we can anticipate possible scenarios that could influence developments and of course impact our policy stance,' Abenoja said.
Monetary policy or interest rates are among the tools used by central banks to stabilize inflation through controlling money supply by raising borrowing costs.
For example, the BSP sets the overnight reverse repurchase rate or the key policy rate, in which the central bank borrows from banks to maintain price stability.
This, in turn, impacts the country's money supply as it shifts money from banks into the central bank. — RSJ, GMA Integrated News