The Western Highlands province is an important contributor to the country’s balance of payments performance, mainly through coffee. The Board members, Bank officials and I had the opportunity to visit one of the successful tea factories in this province, and are very encouraged by their products.
This has provided new challenges for understanding transmission channels between economies and for forecasting inflation.6 At the same time, however, the stronger relationship between commodity markets and investment flows could potentially allow us to use commodity prices as new indicators of financial conditions in global markets, although determining the precise nature of the  6  For a discussion of the increasing difficulty in modelling and forecasting inflation, see “Issues in Inflation”, Global Macro Issues, Deutsche Bank, March 2011.