Special data dissemination standards

Austria’s participation in the special data dissemination standards of the International Monetary Fund

Owing to the urgent demand of international financial markets for up-to-date, representative economic and financial statistics and, above all, standards for their publication, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has, after a lengthy discussion and consultative phase with potential data users and its member states, drawn up the special data dissemination standard (SDDS) and invited all member states to comply “voluntarily” with this standard.The SDDS relates to qualitative information concerning key economic data and its publication and availability.This information, also known as metadata, is provided by the competent institutions of the respective countries and made accessible to the public by the IMF (via the Internet)..

Austria was the 34th country to commit to the standard.As the largest national producer of public statistics and therefore responsible for most of the indicators and statistics required by the IMF, Statistics Austria provided the majority of this information.The Austrian information and metadata relating to key economic indicators have been available on the Internet at http://dsbb.imf.org since mid-July 1997.Within the framework of this agreement, since 1 January 2000 there has been a requirement to make the latest live data available at the time of first release.