ANNUAL REPORT 2008 - Polymer Bank Notes of the World

As of January 2009 Slovakia is thus obliged to meet all the statistical requirements of the ECB,i.e. to provide fully harmonised and comparable national data. 1 Since the preparatory workfor new statistics requires a long lead time, Národná banka Slovenska and the ECB started thestatistical preparations well before Slovakia joined the EU. After becoming a member of theESCB, Národná banka Slovenska intensified its preparations to fulfil the requirements of theECB in the field of monetary, banking, balance of payments, government finance, financialaccounts and other financial statistics. In addition, it had to carry out the necessary preparationsfor the integration of Slovak credit institutions into the ECB’s minimum reserve system and tofulfil the relevant statistical requirements.For the data reporters and NCBs of the other euro area countries, the enlargement of the euroarea means that since January 2009 they have had to report transactions (or flows) and positionswith residents of Slovakia as part of the euro area data, rather than as transactions and positionswith non-euro area residents.In addition, Slovakia and the other euro area countries all had to provide backdata with sufficientgeographical and sector detail, dating back as far as 2004, the year Slovakia joined the EU.Regarding the publication of euro area statistics, the ECB has granted users online access to twosets of time series, one containing data for the current euro area (i.e. including Slovakia) as farback as available, and one linking the various compositions of the euro area, starting with the11 countries in 1999.1 The statistical requirements of the ECB are summarised in the document “ECB statistics: an overview”, April 2008.ECBAnnual Report2008141