The quarterly financial accounts statistics – New statistics at the CNB
In October 2007, the Czech National Bank launched regular publication of quarterly financial accounts statistics. This is a brand new area of statistics for the CNB, providing complete information about financial assets and obligations in individual economic sectors, the financial relations between them and the external relations of the economy as a whole. The financial accounts form an integral part of the national accounts and, in their aggregate form, record the opening and closing balances of financial assets and liabilities on an unconsolidated basis (financial balance sheets), as well as the individual factors that affect such balances, i.e. transactions (the financial account), price factors (the revaluation account) and other factors (the other changes account). A notable feature of the financial accounts statistics is that they link the outputs of other published statistics at the macroeconomic level, harmonising them and thus providing consistent information not only about individual economic sectors, but also about their interconnections broken down by financial instrument.
The financial accounts are an important source of information, with broad application both in monetary policy analyses of the monetary transmission mechanism and in financial stability analyses of the economy as a whole and its individual sectors. For this reason, the ECB also pays close attention to these statistics. It is developing quarterly financial accounts statistics as an integral part of the system of quarterly accounts for the euro area.
Responsibility for compiling the quarterly financial accounts in the Czech Republic rests with the Czech National Bank. Data are released 110 days after the end of the relevant quarter. Currently, only the balance sheets of financial assets and liabilities of individual economic sectors are published, broken down by economic instrument. The information includes previously unpublished quarterly data, such as the structure of financial instruments in the Czech economy (see Chart 1), the net financial positions of individual economic sectors (see Chart 2) and the structure of financial assets and liabilities in individual economic sectors. The statistics, together with detailed information relating to the quarterly financial accounts methodology and the publication schedule, are available in the Statistics section of the CNB website.
