The Mandate

The Central Bank’s duties include the timely publication of the main national macroeconomic statistics, including monetary and foreign exchange statistics, the balance of payments, the national accounts, and other comprehensive economic and social accounting systems.

The Bank processes and publishes daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual statistics, including the calculation of the National Accounts, the Balance of Payments, indexation indicators such as the unidad de fomento (an inflation-indexed unit of account), the foreign exchange market, interest rates, monetary aggregates, international reserves, the trade balance, the securities markets, and external debt, among others.

The Bank also undertakes and coordinates statistical research and analysis, always incorporating the highest international standards.

The Bank publishes the Economic Activity Index (Imacec) monthly. Quarterly publications include the National Accounts, which reflect the evolution of gross domestic product (GDP), and the Balance of Payments, which reflects the trade of goods, services, and transfers to and from abroad.

All the statistical reports are published on an established schedule, contributing to macroeconomic analysis and decisionmaking of public and private agents in the country.

7.1 Performance in 2018

The Bank continued to carry out its macroeconomic statistics revision and publication program: National Accounts, Balance of Payments and International Investment Position, Monetary and Financial Statistics, and Foreign Exchange Statistics.

In response to initiatives promoted by international organizations, the Bank published the first Securities Market Statistics report on 23 March 2018. The objective is to contribute to a better interpretation of agents’ role in financial intermediation, as well as to correctly incorporate debt instruments in the macroeconomic aggregates. The report provides a comprehensive overview of the stock of public and private bonds, notes, and other negotiable financial instruments, with a breakdown by sector, issue market, original and residual maturity, and debt service. Holders of securities are also classified by sector.

The report presents quarterly data going back to the first quarter of 2013. It is published with a lag of 75 days from the cutoff date for the most recent statistics.

In 2018, work began on the 2018 Benchmark Compilation (BC-2018), which provides the basis for revising the National Accounts estimates. The project considers the implementation of new international methodological recommendations and innovations in matters of data sources and estimation methods. It will also take into account new phenomena associated with the digital and globalized economy.

In this context, a study on agriculture and fruit cultivation was tendered and awarded to collect basic information for estimating value added in these sectors, as these data are not usually available.

Work also began on planning and defining the technical aspects of a price survey for measuring sales margins by product, in a joint project with the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The BC-2018 will be published in the fourth quarter of 2021, and the historical series, reconciled with the new measurement framework, will be released in March 2022.

To provide historical time series compatible with the BC-2013, the Bank published the spliced Imacec and regional GDP data on 26 April 2018.

In the case of the Imacec, the spliced series provides monthly economic activity series from 1996 to 2008, with a breakdown by mining and nonmining sectors. For regional GDP, the spliced series increased the coverage of regional statistics disaggregated by sector for the 2008–2012 period, with an annual frequency, measured in current prices and volume.

The Bank implemented an annual plan for evaluating the quality of the statistics compiled by the Statistics Division, following an assessment in 2017 by the Statistics Department of the Bank of Portugal with regard to compliance with best practices in statistics.

Progress was made on the Microdata: Integration, Development, and Exploitation (MIDE) project, whose objective is to achieve a more efficient and centralized management of the Bank’s microdatabases, improving their organization, increasing privacy protection, and incorporating the use of specialized software available internationally.

In addition, processes were modernized to allow continuous data loading and automated standardization, revision, comparison, and analysis. This reduces the time required for the full process and ensures the completeness and historical consistency of the databases involved.

In accordance with the demand for new financial infrastructures, the Statistics Division continued to move forward on the creation of an Integrated Derivatives Information System (IDIS), which will serve as a trade repository for recording derivative transactions.

In line with the principle of separation of functions within the Bank and the correct assignment of processes, in October 2018 the Statistics Division began to calculate the interbank interest rate, that is, the daily weighted average interest rate on overnight loans between banks. Until September, this task was performed by the Financial Markets Division.

As part of the international relations program, the Statistics Division takes part in expert working groups sponsored by different international organizations, such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations. In August 2018, the Bank became a formal member of the International Network of Exchanging Experiences on Statistical Handling of Granular Data (INEXDA), created to facilitate the use of anonymized granular data.

The Bank also renewed its participation as co-chair of the CEMLA Financial Information Forum (FIF), together with Mexico and Peru.

In August, Chile was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Irving Fisher Committee (IFC) of the BIS, starting on 1 January 2019. This committee shares experiences on monitoring developments related to data, analytical methods, their value relative to “traditional” statistics, and the risks associated with their use, depending on the precision of the information.

Domestically, the Statistics Division continued to strengthen its relationship with academics, economists, and market analysts through the Users Committee. The objective of this Committee is to improve communication and feedback on the statistics that are regularly compiled by the Division, including the methods used and diffusion policies, and on current statistics projects, in the framework of the Central Bank’s strategic planning.

The Committee met three times in 2018, with an average attendance of around 15 guests. The issues addressed included the diffusion of the 2017 Household Finance Survey, as well as the main results of research projects on measures of heterogeneity in the Chilean economy and the value of land zoned for residential use.

Finally, the use of the Bank’s statistical apps continued to grow, albeit with changes in user preferences. In line with the frequency of the data, the Daily Indicators page continued to be the most used, with almost six million visits in the year (measured via Google Analytics). In second place, the Statistical Database for mobile devices more than doubled the number of visits, from just over 675,000 in 2017 to 1.6 million in 2018. The traditional Statistical Database, in turn, received over 660,000 visits.

The use of the Web Service, implemented through the Statistical Database, allows the direct mass transmission of data to personal or business computers. There are currently around 200 firms (and people) that actively use this service.

In January 2018, the Board voted to end the daily calculation and publication of the reference exchange rate (dólar acuerdo) and the associated currency basket. This decision reflects the fact that the reference exchange rate is no longer used by the Bank, for either its balance sheet or its financial statements.