Since 2014, as a central bank, we have an access to the individual balance sheets of all the corporate entities in the economy. The granularity of the data allows for a closer look at the behavior of the firms in different sectors, their performances, their leverage, structure of their sources of financing, the potential vulnerabilities which might cumulate in different sectors, with different implications for the economy in general. All of this is valuable information, not affordable by using the aggregates only. I would still like to emphasize that for small economies, as the Macedonian, the usage of micro data on a regular basis for monetary policy purposes is not an unknown practice. Given that, we are small and open economy, with a strategy of de facto fixed exchange rate, where in depth scrutinization of the external sector data has been a practice with a long tradition. The incoming data on external sector is analyzed on aggregate and sectoral level, but also some of the micro data on individual companies is being monitored on a monthly basis. This pertains mainly to some of the traditional sectors with relatively large weight in the total export, like the metal industry. Given its importance, and at the same time its large exposure to external shocks, regular monitoring of the individual data provides first signals for potential vulnerabilities.
In 2014, bilateral agreements with all regulatory bodies for OFIs have been amended encompassing securities statistics, arranging data sharing and streamlining the data collection for the needs of the National Bank through the regulators, enabling parallel access to the data, as well as increased quality controls in the process of data collection, and above all overcoming confidentiality issues. The other side of the coin is that enhanced data sets pose some challenges. More frequent granular data increases the reporting burden of the industry, but also the burden of the statisticians. This further underlines the need for “merit and cost” procedure and reinvestigating the potential of data sharing among domestic or international institutions, which brings us to the issue of comparability and possibility of using the similar data sets for different purposes. Better cooperation among regulatory agencies may help in this regard. The switch from “aggregate statistics” to granular multi-purpose statics requires adequate statistical resources including IT infrastructure and tools to process and present data in a meaningful form for the policymakers, as they should be able to see the wood and not be lost among the trees. The extensive production and usage of individual, micro data raises an important question on the data security and data confidentiality issues. So far, we have seen that it can be an important constraint both for statistics, but also for the analytical work. Knowing that the data are available in the system, but restricted for use, is very often a reality in our day-to-day work.