Erdem Başçi: Central bank responsibilities, global financial stability and payment systems Opening remarks by Mr Erdem Başçi, Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, at the “Payment Systems Conference”, organized by Al Bank Wal Mustathmer Group, Istanbul, 5 December 2012. *  *  *  Distinguished Governors of the Central Banks, Distinguished Guests and Esteemed Members of the Press, I would like to thank you all on behalf of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey and myself for your participation in the “Payment Systems Conference” organized by Al Bank Wal Mustathmer Group. Welcome to İstanbul and Turkey. Participants to the conference, who are all experts in the field, will be discussing payment systems, their significance and contemporary approaches. Before moving onto the topic of payment systems, I would like to briefly mention the main responsibility areas of central banks. Distinguished Guests, Price stability, financial stability and the development of the financial sector are three significant fields central banks are responsible for, either partially or fully. The primary objective is price stability. The social costs to be incurred from the loss of price stability have been thoroughly understood by economists.
The crisis, for example, had a different impact on the Albanian economy, from what we had historically experienced. At the time, the Albanian economy did not seem to be vulnerable to the foreign sector. Subsequent analysis, however, showed that domestic imbalances had built and, indeed, made the economy vulnerable to a foreign credibility shock. It is crucial that research in central banks focus on available information and methodologies, which scrutinize existing paradigms, making this information useful to policymaking, before it becomes or leads to vulnerabilities. In light of the financial and human capital constraints faced by central banks in small, open economies, such as Albania, we believe that it is important for these topics to be discussed, in this workshop, with fellow researchers from academia and other central banks. I would like to encourage our researchers to publish their papers in relevant, peer-reviewed 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  journals as the most important certification of their work. This will make your research projects more useful and facilitate speedy implementation in mainstream policy making. Despite recent success in publications, one of the things that I hear the most is that there is not much research interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies like Albania. From my prospective, I think that there is interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies such as Albania, because of the particular and distinguishing characteristics of our economy, which can be different from those represented in mainstream research findings.