Press Release No. 15/466

Press Release: The People’s Republic of China Subscribes to the IMF’s Special Data Dissemination Standard

October 7, 2015

The People’s Republic of China subscribed today to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), marking a major step forward for official statistics in the country. Participation in the SDDS is expected to enhance a country’s availability of timely and comprehensive statistics and contribute to the pursuit of sound macroeconomic policies.

“The subscription to the SDDS underscores China’s strong commitment to transparency as well as to the adoption of international best practices in statistics,” said Mr. David Lipton, First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, at a ceremony on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in Lima.

“China and the IMF have been working together to improve China’s statistics for many years and subscribing to the SDDS is another milestone of this fruitful and important collaboration,” said Mr. Yi Gang, Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China. “We are committed to further strengthening our statistical system and enhancing transparency, as this is not only crucial for our own policy making, but also beneficial for a better understanding of the Chinese economy by the outside world,” he added.

China is the 14th country to graduate to the SDDS from the IMF’s General Data Dissemination System (GDDS), in which the country has participated since 2002. China’s participation brings the number of subscribing economies to 65.

Background

The SDDS, established by the IMF in March 1996, is intended to guide members in the provision of economic and financial data to the public. Subscription to the SDDS enhances the availability of timely statistics, thereby contributing to sound macroeconomic policies and the proper functioning of financial markets. The SDDS identifies four dimensions of data dissemination—data coverage, periodicity, and timeliness; access by the public; the integrity of the data; and data quality. Although voluntary, a subscribing member commits to observe the standard and to provide information (metadata) to the IMF about its data dissemination practices. This information is made publicly available on the IMF's Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB).

The DSBB now provides comprehensive documentation in English on the statistical practices of China for the SDDS data categories, hyperlinked to country data included in the National Summary Data Page, which is maintained by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

China’s SDDS information is available at http://dsbb.imf.org/Pages/SDDS/CtyCtgList.aspx?ctycode=CHN