Keynote speech by Philip R. Lane, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the joint Banco de España, Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics and European Central Bank conference “External statistics after the pandemic: addressing novel analytical challenges” in Madrid

Madrid, 12 February 2024

Introduction

It is my great pleasure to speak at this second edition of the conference on external statistics, jointly organised by the Banco de España, the Irving Fisher Committee and the European Central Bank, after having contributed already to the first edition of this conference in Lisbon in February 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic.^[1] As a long-standing user of external statistics, both in academia and as a central banker, I am very pleased to see that since the last conference the richness and availability of external statistics – in particular for the euro area – has been further enhanced. This is of particularly high value for the analysis we do…