Press Release No. 22/410

G20 Leaders Welcome New Data Gaps Initiative to Address Climate Change, Inclusion and Financial Innovation

November 28, 2022

Washington, DC:

To support the production of data for the most urgent policy needs, IMF staff, in close cooperation with the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Secretariat and the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics (IAG), and in consultation with participating economies, have developed a high-level workplan for a new Data Gaps Initiative (DGI).

The workplan covers 14 recommendations addressing priority policy needs in the areas of: (i) climate change; (ii) distribution of household income and wealth; (iii) fintech and financial inclusion; and (iv) access to private sources of data and administrative data, and data sharing to improve the timeliness and granularity of official statistics.

The G20 Leaders, in the G20 Bali Leaders' Declaration , welcomed the DGI workplan and asked “the IMF, the FSB and the IAG to begin work on filling these data gaps and report back on progress in the second half of 2023, noting that the targets are ambitious and delivery will need to take into account national statistical capacities, priorities, and country circumstances as well as avoiding overlap and duplication at international level.”

Following the Declaration, IMF Deputy Managing Director Bo Li noted that “the IMF is looking forward to working with the IAG, the FSB Secretariat, and participating economies to progress the work in these critical policy areas. Global policy action is required to address the escalating climate crisis. Monitoring progress towards achieving climate goals and tracking developments in financial innovation and economic inclusion is needed for policymakers to take decisive actions to bolster resilience and foster inclusive growth”.

The Data Gaps Initiative will build on the close collaboration among the participating economies and international organizations established during Phase 2 of the Data Gaps Initiative (DGI-2), and explicit support from the G20. The recommendations are expected to be implemented within five years after the launch. As with previous phases, implementation will be monitored and published on the DGI Website beginning in 2023.

Notes to editors

In October 2009, the FSB and IMF published The Financial Crisis and Information Gaps , a report which responded to a request from the G20 Ministers and Governors to explore information gaps and provide appropriate proposals for strengthening data collection. The report, which set out a series of recommendations to address identified data gaps, was endorsed by G20 Ministers and Governors and led to the first phase of work (DGI-1). In September 2015, it was agreed that the DGI work should continue into a second phase
(DGI-2).

The main objective of DGI-2 was to implement the regular collection and dissemination of reliable and timely statistics for policy use. DGI-2 also included new recommendations to reflect evolving policymaker needs. Its 20 recommendations were clustered under three main headings: (i) monitoring risk in the financial sector; (ii) vulnerabilities, interconnections and spillovers; and (iii) data sharing and communication of official statistics. DGI-2 maintained continuity with the DGI-1 recommendations while setting more specific objectives for G20 economies to compile and disseminate minimum common datasets for these recommendations. DGI-2 was successfully completed in December 2021 and the report published on the DGI Website .

The member agencies of the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics (IAG) are the Bank for International Settlements, European Central Bank, Eurostat, IMF (Chair), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations and the World Bank. The FSB participates in the IAG meetings.