The parcelling out of agricultural land impedes the effective organisation of production, decreases the profitability and raises the agricultural mechanics utilization cost. The Bank of Albania deems that energy remains our main challenge in the short-run and in the medium-run. We have been faced with underlined power supply constraints for about a decade. The current crisis coincidence in time with a global environment that is rather sensitive to this problem has relatively increased the energy import costs, which could be unsustainable in the long run. It has resulted out of Bank of Albania surveys that the negative consequences arising from this situation are numerous and directly related to the economic activity of the productive sector, in both levels, corporate and small and medium sized enterprises. The frequent recurrence of such situation poses the risk that periods of significant power constraints are no longer regarded as accidental shocks, but they are more and more classified as permanent factors that should be factorised in the production cost, and hence should be taken into account in pricing policies and their expectations. To this end, the Bank of Albania estimates that, starting from 2007, all the respective decision-making stakeholders should apply a new concrete management policy, different from the 15-year practice. An integral part of it should be not only the management of current energy resources, but also concrete steps in the distribution network, as short-term measures to pass to long-term operations, which would imply the establishment of alternative energy sources.
Bandid Nijathaworn: Are there limits to transparency? Remarks by Mr Bandid Nijathaworn, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the IMF Conference on Central Bank Communications, Mumbai, 23 January 2006. *  *  *  First, let me thank the IMF and the Reserve Bank of India for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be here in Mumbai. And I should also congratulate the IMF for putting up what seems to be another useful and successful seminar. My contribution today is to speak on limits to transparency. Given the limitations of time, I want to begin by looking at the needs of central banks for limiting transparency, especially in the context of central banks’ own operations. Then, I want to speak on the challenge facing central banks in designing appropriate disclosure policy. And finally, I want to share with you my thought on how to approach transparency in the context of monetary policy. Transparency has now become an important policy aspect of central banking. Not only is transparency linked directly to the governance issue, but greater transparency also imparts important benefits to the effectiveness of central bank policies. In broad terms, three benefits from greater transparency are often cited. First, greater information provided by the central banks allows market participants to accurately evaluate the behavior and the performance of central banks. This is most important for public organizations like central banks. Second, financial markets tend to work more efficiently with greater transparency.