The BOK has posted the pre-release access list, which includes the President and the Minister of Finance and Economy, on the Data Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB) since October 2001. It has already posted a summary methodology statement for the DSBB since December 2001.

When converting import and export transactions in dollar terms into local currency terms, the BOK has used the actual transaction exchange rates applied for the goods instead of the average exchange rates since the second quarter of 2001.

The BOK has drawn up a 1993 SNA implementation plan and has studied appropriate implementation approaches. Most of the considerations in the plan will be reflected in compiling the national accounts in 2004 when the 2000 base year revision is completed. The production and asset boundary will be extended to comply with the 1993 SNA after the completion of the 2000 base year revision.

Transparency in statistics release has been improved by posting the fact that the balance of payments statistics are provided to the President and the Minister of Finance and Economy in the late afternoon of the day before their release to the public.

As transactions of goods with North Korea are to be included in the BOP from the 2002 final data, which will be released about June or July 2003, the scope of balance of payments (BOP) statistics will be enlarged and the inconsistencies between BOP statistics and the external sector of the national accounts will be resolved.

There had been progress made in the classification and sectorization by the reclassifying of the Equalization Fund to the monetary authorities sector.

Progress in accessibility for users has been made by supplying explanations of those metadata regarding concepts, scope of the data, classifications, etc. which are not consistent with BPM5.

Since June 2001, no government officials outside the Bank of Korea have had access to the producer price index before release of the data to the public.

The Korean Central Product Classification (KCPC), derived from the Central Product Classification (CPC), is under development at the NSO and is expected to be used in the PPI compilation with the 2005 base year revision.

The activities of free trade zones and bonded warehouses will be included in the next IPI(International Price Index) revision(2000 base year). And a chained Laspeyres index will be initially applied to the revised IPI as a reference index.

The Bank of Korea has compiled revised monetary aggregates since the beginning of 2002, almost fully complying with the Monetary and Financial Statistics Manual (MFSM 2000) of the IMF. Therefore, the inconsistencies with the MFSM have been resolved in relation to liquidity-based aggregates, classification/sectorization, common definition of the money holding and money issuing sector etc. In addition, this revision has improved the consistency between monetary and financial statistics and other macroeconomic statistics such as Flow of Funds, the BOP and the National Accounts.

• – The revised surveys(central bank survey and depository corporations survey) provide the full range of instruments and sector details recommended in the MFSM, so they are fully compliant with the terminology of the MFSM.

• – The revised aggregates are based only on the liquidity of financial instruments. And they have the same money-issuing and money-holding sectors across the different monetary aggregates. The former consist of depository corporations (central bank, other depository corporations), while the latter consist of other financial corporations, social security funds, local governments, non-financial corporations, households and non-residents.

• – Depository corporations have replaced the DMBs, which made up the money-issuing sector of the old M2, and they form the single money-issuing sector of the new monetary aggregates (new M1, new M2).

• – The revised statistics provide information on financial derivatives, shares and other equity, and the insurance technical reserve in conformity with the MFSM.

• – In the revised statistics, deposits with a maturity of more than 2 years and illiquid deposits are separately classified and excluded from the new monetary aggregates (new M1, new M2). Demand deposits with suspended financial institutions are separately classified and omitted from new M1. In addition, all deposits with them will be excluded from new M2, if they are considered to be illiquid.

• Domestic borrowings by financial institutions are separately classified, and borrowings from central government by financial institutions are distinguishably separated on the basis of gross borrowings.

• Repurchase and reverse repurchase agreements are recorded separately and are classified as deposits and loans respectively.

• – The revised surveys (central bank survey and depository corporations survey) fully reflect resident financial institutions’ holdings of foreign currency denominated debentures, because they include all financial institutions except for some that do not buy foreign currency denominated debentures.

• – The recording of overseas branches, which are non-residents, is strictly separated from that of their head offices. Therefore, profits (losses) of overseas branches are not recorded on the books of banks’ head offices.

The BOK plans to change the SDDS metadata so as to reflect the revised statistics as soon as it has finished retrieving past series data and updating all periodicals as well as its homepage.

The BOK does its best to minimize distortions by drawing banks’ attention to the need to determine the residency of account holders accurately by sending out official circulars.