BIS, IMF, OECD and the World Bank launch joint external debt website

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank are jointly launching a new website — the Joint External Debt Hub (JEDH) — to provide a one-stop source of comprehensive external debt statistics compiled from national and creditor/market sources. The new website is located at www.jedh.org.

The JEDH brings together national external debt data provided by 54 subscribers to the IMF's Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS); creditor/market sourced external debt and selected foreign assets data for 175 countries; and associated metadata for the two sets of statistics. The national external debt data are sourced from the World Bank's Quarterly External Debt database (QEDS), and the creditor/market data are sourced from the four agencies. The JEDH replaces the tables currently at www.oecd.org/statistics/jointdebt and expands the available range of information.

The new website provides timely access to quarterly external debt statistics, hence greatly facilitating macroeconomic analysis, and cross-country and data source comparisons. For each of the 54 SDDS subscribers, data are provided on loans and deposits, debt securities, and trade credits and, where available, the national and the creditor/market viewpoints are compared.

This website launch builds on a number of initiatives started in the late 1990s by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics¹ to improve availability of comprehensive and consistent external debt statistics. Major milestones include the quarterly publication of the market/creditor data from 1999; the publication of the External Debt Statistics: Guide for Compilers and Users in 2003; the dissemination since September 2003 of national quarterly external debt position data with a one quarter lag by SDDS subscribers, with redissemination of these data for most subscribers on the World Bank's QEDS website from 2004; and the recent development by the IMF of the data quality assessment framework for external debt statistics.

The JEDH utilises Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) standards established by BIS, ECB, Eurostat, IMF, OECD, UN and the World Bank for efficient data exchange and sharing in a user-friendly environment.

¹ The other members of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics are the Commonwealth Secretariat, the European Central Bank, Eurostat, the Paris Club Secretariat, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.