The Bundesbank, along with other important data providers in Germany, has today started publishing indicators in accordance with the Special Data Dissemination Standard Plus (SDDS Plus) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This puts Germany among the first nine countries worldwide to adhere to the most comprehensive standard internationally for a uniform approach to economic and financial data provision.

The new data standard, SDDS Plus, provides important information regarding financial risks and international financial linkages. The publication of these statistics therefore closes significant information gaps exposed during the recent crisis and improves the basis for financial stability analysis, explains Professor Claudia Buch, Deputy President of the Deutsche Bundesbank. She is the member of the Bundesbank's Executive Board responsible for overseeing statistics and financial stability. Essentially, by having internationally uniform requirements for publishing statistics, we are able to create an entirely new basis for comparison, particularly for countries with systemically important financial sectors.

In the light of the economic and financial crisis, the IMF established the SDDS Plus in 2012 as an extension of the existing SDDS, under which Germany has already been publishing real, fiscal, financial and external sector data since 1996. The main differences between the SDDS and the SDDS Plus are the provision of data in nine additional categories by 2019 and the provision of machine-readable files for all data categories, with time series of at least five years in length.

From mid-February 2015, Germany will initially publish data for six of the nine additional categories requested. These include general government operations, holdings of debt securities broken down by debtor and creditor sectors, and sectoral balance sheets, ie data on the financial linkages between the individual sectors of the economy. Furthermore, Germany has committed to participating in the IMF surveys “Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey”, “Coordinated Direct Investment Survey” and “Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves”. Germany will contribute to further data categories by the end of 2019 by providing figures on general government gross debt, financial soundness indicators, and financial assets and liabilities of non-bank financial intermediaries.

Along with the Bundesbank, the Federal Statistical Office and the Federal Ministry of Finance have committed to compiling the relevant indicators and publishing them on the National Summary Data Page (NSDP) for Germany.

Apart from Germany, the first countries to adhere to the SDDS Plus are France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United States.