Central banks and external statistics: Evolution or revolution?1

Globalisation is posing important challenges to external statistics, which have been reinforced in recent decades by rapid digital innovation, the complexity and limited transparency of multinational corporate structures, and the increased importance of global financial centres. Examples of such challenges include the fragmentation of global production chains and the changing nature of foreign direct investment. One fundamental question is whether the multipurpose analytical tool provided by external statistics should be simply adapted or radically transformed to address these issues. The experience of central banks shows that a number of alternative ways can be effectively developed in the medium term to adapt the current external statistics framework, especially by: collecting supplementary data; enhancing the infrastructure supporting compilation; focusing the analysis on large and global corporate groups; presenting more granular data for the aggregates currently compiled; and revisiting the concept of foreign direct investment.