We experienced, however, that having a forecasting round every quarter leaves very little time for the staff to digest new information and conduct thorough analyses before the next Report had to be written. This is why we  4  Geraats, P.M., 2002. Central bank transparency, Economic Journal 112 (483), F532–F565. 5  Eijffinger, Sylvester and Petra Geraats (2006) "How Transparent Are Central Banks?" European Journal of Political Economy 22(1), March, pp. 1-21. 6  Dincer, N. Nergiz and Barry Eichengreen (2007) "Central Bank Transparency: Where, Why, and with What Effects?," NBER Working Papers 13003, National Bureau of Economic Research. 7  I thank Negriz Dincer and Barry Eichengreen for providing the sub-indexes for Norway, which were not reported in their paper. BIS Review 132/2008  5  started publishing three Reports a year instead of four. The Riksbank has come to the same conclusion and reduced the number of reports from four to three per year in 2006. I do not regret that Norges Bank made this move, and if I have to choose between good analyses and a high score on the Eijffinger-Geraats index, I know what I will choose. The third reason why we lost points on the Eijffinger-Geraats index is that we do not publish minutes and voting records. It is true that we do not publish voting records. This is because we have a collegial, and not individualistic, monetary policy committee, where the members of the Executive Boards stand unified behind the decision.
The exact specification of the shocks in the illustrations can differ somewhat from one Report to another, but the shifts in the interest rate, and the corresponding scenarios for inflation and the output gap give an indication of how the Bank responds. The shifts are specified such that, if shocks of the same type and size should occur, the alternative interest rate path is the Bank’s best estimate of how the interest rate would be set in such a situation. In addition to presenting policy reactions to new developments, the Monetary Policy Report includes an account of the disturbances that have lead to a change in the interest rate  2  BIS Review 132/2008  forecast from the previous Report. For example, we see from Chart 3 that our interest rate forecast was revised upwards in Monetary Policy Report 2/08 published in June. The shocks contributing to this revision are illustrated in Chart 4. The black line is the difference between the current interest rate path and the path in the previous Report. The “interest rate account” is a technical model-based illustration of how the change in the interest rate forecast from the previous Report can be decomposed by different exogenous shocks to the model. The illustration shows how changes in the assessment of international and domestic economic variables as well as changes in shock processes have affected the interest rate path, and is based on our core forecasting model.