Eastern Caribbean Central Bank 2024-2025 Annual Report

EASTERN CARIBBEAN CENTRAL BANK ANNUAL REPORT 2024 - 2025

Organisational Effectiveness and Development

Economic Statisticians and Country Economists provided further support and collaborated with the member countries during the IMF Article IV Missions held during the period April 2024 to March 2025. The Bank conducted the Biannual Business Outlook Surveys (BOS) in July 2024 and January 2025, to support macroeconomic analysis. The BOS infographic is disseminated to the public via social media and emailed to major internal and external stakeholders. The Bank released its monthly infographic on comparative fuel prices in the ECCU, as part of its data dissemination and awareness campaign. Development work on the Import Bill Tracker also intensified during the year, given the focus and importance of Food Security in the region. The fuel information and the Import Bill tracker data are widely used to inform policy discussions. During the financial year, the Bank continued to provide timely, reliable and accessible monetary and financial statistics to various stakeholders - locally, regionally and internationally. The Bank also improved its data management software by implementing additional safeguards and quality controls to enhance the quality and accuracy of data collected and reported by the ECCB. The Bank also collaborated with partner agencies (commercial banks, non-bank financial institutions, payment system institutions, ministries of finance, the International Monetary Fund) on data compilation and dissemination aimed at enhancing monetary and financial statistics. The ECCB continued to publish selected data on individual commercial banks within the ECCU,

during the fiscal year 2024-2025. This was aimed at empowering data users by allowing them to view and compare statistics across commercial banks as well as against national and ECCU averages.

Business Outlook Survey January - June 2024

The Business Outlook Survey is a semi-annual survey designed to capture the opinions of 200 businesses within the ECCU in respect of the current and expected state of their business operations as well as the economies in which they operate. The response rate for the January - June 2024 survey was 91.5 per cent. The respondents focused on twomainareas: individual businessperformance and the general economic conditions. The Net Percentage Indicator (NPI) is critical to the analysis. It measures the difference between responsesmarked “improved” and “deteriorated”. Key outlook for 2024 relative to 2023: • An NPI of 36.1 was achieved, indicating an overall improvement in the sentiments for general economic conditions. • Most of the businesses surveyed were considered small enterprises. • Generally, supply chain disruptions are not expected to affect business operations. • Cash is the most widely used form of payment by customers in the ECCU. • The top challenge businesses face was attracting skilled employees.

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