Mr Sonakul covers a number of aspects, including good governance, transparency, public policy in the private sector and the financial system in Thailand  Speech by Mr M R Chatu Mongol Sonakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the Credit Suisse First Boston Asian Investor Conference 2000, held in Hong Kong, on 22 March 2000. *  *  *  This is the first major Investment Conference I have attended in the new millennium - so life goes on - although public speaking is a major part of the life of a central bank governor, it is not the only part and we actually have to study theories and concepts, and execute and implement so let me speak on what we have done during the last two years of the last millennium when I took on this job. I will not address extensively macroeconomic issues. You probably know nearly as much as we do. Our website alone gives a lot of information and macroeconomic data and analysis are easy to come by. In any case, macroeconomic wise, our economy is in a reasonable shape. Growth has been significantly and continuously positive for the last four quarters and we expect the trend to go on. Exchange rates are stable and interest rates are at an all time low, whilst capacity utilisation, at the best for a long time, is still only at 63%, belaying any fear of significant inflation in the near future.
So we hired outside webpage experts to upgrade it, who have been working for the last year, and will be ready to go forward with our easy-to-read, easy-to-use, user-friendly format in the next couple of months. The information available on our webpage, whilst extensive does not go back very far in history, and to do real economic analysis, you may have to contact with the team responsible for these issues. Though this is easily done automatically by just clicking into the information item, it is still much better to have the information readily available on the internet rather than having to contact people. In the more major task of restructuring the organisation, the work system and the vision of the Bank of Thailand which we have been doing in the past two years, we have established a new department called the Data Warehouse Department. This department will store all the information of the Bank, sourcing the raw information totally by EDI, thereby dispensing with the more than 900 paper reports that the financial institutions are having to fill every month and make the information available to  1  BIS Review 29/2000  every user inside the Bank of Thailand and outside the Bank according as to their needs and access clearance. Upon completion of the data warehouse, we have a plan to make economic information available on our webpage over a 20-year historical time-span, and this will be done in the next two years.