This is mirrored by the fruitful cooperation between the statistical departments of national central banks (NCBs) and national statistical institutes (NSIs), both at the national and at the European level, for instance in the Committee on Monetary, Financial and Balance of Payments Statistics (CMFB). For this reason, I am particularly pleased that Commissioner Almunia has kindly accepted our invitation to give the keynote speech at this conference and that the programme includes a session organised jointly by Eurostat and the ECB’s Directorate-General Statistics and chaired by Mr Carré, the Director-General of Eurostat. I would like briefly to consider three issues: 1.  recent enhancements to euro area statistics from the ECB’s perspective as a policymaker;  2.  the importance of the appropriate communication of statistics; and  3.  the strategy for the further development of euro area statistics. Recent enhancements to euro area statistics from the ECB’s perspective as a policy maker First of all, I would like to reiterate that reliable and timely euro area economic, monetary and financial statistics are of paramount importance for the ECB’s decision-making. This applies not only to the single monetary policy, but also to the other ESCB tasks, including those in the areas of financial stability and payment systems. Statistics are themselves one of the main deliverables of the ECB, providing market participants, analysts, academics, the media and the general public with the aggregate financial data they need.
For instance, the harmonised national average interest rates on the deposits and loans of households and  BIS Review 50/2008  1  corporations that are published every month by the ECB and the NCBs provide citizens and firms with very useful preliminary insights. 1 Concerning the key developments in ECB statistics over the last two years, I would like to highlight the following 2 : 1. Since June of last year the ECB and Eurostat have jointly compiled and published quarterly euro area accounts. 3 These accounts can be considered the “national accounts” for the euro area and provide a complete and consistent overview of its economic, financial and monetary developments. A fairly unique feature of the euro area accounts is their almost entirely consistent representation of “real” and financial developments, which greatly facilitates integrated analyses and permits further enhanced cross-checking of the economic and monetary analyses that feed into the overall assessment of the ECB’s monetary policy stance. 2. The euro area accounts record not only the economic and financial transactions, but also the financial balance sheets of all institutional sectors (i.e. households, nonfinancial corporations, financial corporations and general government). They integrate and complement more timely and frequent statistics, for instance by providing a sectoral breakdown of the broad monetary aggregate M3 and by providing hitherto unavailable quarterly data on household and corporate income, expenditure, savings and wealth. 3.