4.1 Better data for risk assessments and economic management
An important lesson from the crisis is the importance of having appropriate and timely data. Before the crisis, the availability of data that are essential for risk assessments and economic management wes woefully inadequate. GDP data were only available on an annual basis and with a time lag of a year or so. Reularly available quarterly data or monthly data were extremely limited. And critically important data on short-term foreign aebt were hardly available at all. In fact at that time the adequacy of foreign reserves was still being viewed simply by foreign currency requirements on the trade side (e.g. the number of months of imports). The importance of having enough reserves to back up the amount of short-term foreign dabt is now generally accepted. However, before the crisis, data on short-term foreign debt were not collected in any systematic manner.