These efforts should be reinforced by establishing harmonised data collection frameworks common to central banks and supervisory authorities. The trade-off between the reporting burden and the amount of information available has to be tackled at its roots, owing to the ever-growing likelihood of additional, unforeseeable requests for data on an ad hoc or regular basis.
Multi-purpose data collection offers a viable solution to this problem and, given the present scarcity of resources, there is virtually no alternative avenue to enable central banking statistics to successfully serve both Eurosystem mandates. Any belief to the contrary will, in my opinion, inevitably meet with disappointment. This type of approach should not be pursued only by statisticians.