Central Bank’s annual Research workshop
The Research Department of the Central Bank of Malta organised a half-day Research Workshop on Thursday, 23 November wherein it launched its sixth annual Research Bulletin. The Bulletin is the bank’s annual flagship research publication and is intended to showcase a selection of the bank’s research and make it available to a wider audience.
The workshop was opened by deputy governor Alexander Demarco, who gave an overview of the five articles of the Bulletin. The Bulletin, together with the increasingly diversified range of economic publications and
studies by the bank, are publicly available on centralbankmalta.org.
In the first session of the workshop, Professor Hannes Mueller, Associate Research Professor and Programme director for the Data Science for Decision Making M.Sc. at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE), showed how text-based, and in particular machinelearning techniques, can be used to predict international
conflicts.
In the second presentation, Kurt Sant and Sarah Spiteri, two economists within the bank’s Economics Division, presented their work on the development of a new text-based index. This new index employs novel Big Data-driven methods to capture the extent of economic policy uncertainty in Malta as measured through online local newspaper articles.
The workshop was concluded by a speech delivered by the
governor of the Central Bank of Malta, Professor Edward Scicluna. In his conclusion, Professor Scicluna spoke about the importance of using non-traditional data to complement the analysis that is already done using more traditional data sources. The governor also emphasised the importance of close collaboration between the private and public sector to promote more prominent use of new data techniques to develop
our macroeconomic understanding and therefore improve the formulation and implementation of economic policies.