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Weekly Bulletin issue no. 23, 1999 Statistics Norway's Web service

Statistics Norway's Web service:

Short-term economic indicators for Norway now on the Internet

Statistics Norway (SSB) has set up a separate page with short-term economic indicators for Norway on the Internet at www.ssb.no/nokkeltall, with the English translation at www.ssb.no/en/indicators. The page contains numerous statistics on the following sectors: real, fiscal, financial and external and the population. Established in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in connection with the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), the page is updated continuously as new figures are released.

Forty-seven countries now subscribe to SDDS, including Western industrialized nations and newly industrialized countries in Asia and Latin America. The impetus for SDDS and the establishment of the short-term economic indicators page is internationalization and a growing need for comprehensive, frequent, timely and accurate statistics on the economic development of the individual countries.

The short-term economic indicators page covers the following categories of statistics: national accounts, production indices, employment, unemployment, wages and earnings, consumer prices, producer prices, general government operations, central government operations, central government debt, analytical accounts of the banking sector, analytical accounts of the central bank, interest rates, stock market, balance of payments, international reserves, merchandise trade, exchange rates and population. Quarterly or monthly figures are available for most categories.

General government financing

Certain general government operations data will not be published in any paper publication and will only be published on the short-term economic indicators page. This concerns "financing", which refers to the financing of any budget deficit.

The financing total is divided into domestic financing and foreign financing. Domestic financing is further broken down into domestic bank financing and domestic non-bank financing.

In Norway, general government net lending has been positive since 1994, which means that financing is negative. Government financial assets are primarily built up as foreign assets in the Norwegian Government Petroleum Fund, i.e. as negative foreign financing.

Quarterly central government debt on the Internet

Norway's Ministry of Finance has started publishing quarterly central government debt and state guarantees on its own homepages on the Internet at www.finans.dep.no/, which also contain an advance release calendar for the upcoming quarters. These statistics are not published in any paper publication and are only available on the Internet. In addition, Statistics Norway has the main quarterly central government debt figures and annual central government debt figures dating back to 1965 on its web site at www.ssb.no/

For more information contact:
Jon.Petter.Nossen@ssb.no tel. +47 21 09 45 01, or Erling.Joar.Flottum@ssb.no, tel. +47 21 09 48 50.

Weekly Bulletin issue no. 23, 1999