This document presents the results of a survey that was applied at the Jorge Chávez International Airport, in the city of Lima, Peru, to non-resident Peruvian citizens who visited the country on the occasion of the 2018 December festivities. The theme of the The survey covered various aspects of the profile of these migrants, such as gender, age, education, sector of activity in which they work abroad and income levels, remittances and, where appropriate, the amount of transfers, as well as indicators of financial inclusion.

Mexican emigration to the United States and the employment and income opportunities they have obtained have allowed them to accumulate wealth by acquiring real estate in that country. In fact, the percentage on Mexican immigrant households with their own home was 50 per cent in 2019. Likewise, 58 per cent of such owned homes paid mortgage, so they had mortgage credit. The median value of such owned homes was in that year $177,800. 

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, which has open access, has published a new paper on environmental risk analysis for international reserves management by central banks. The authors, from the Universidade Federal da Bahia, propose an analytical framework for the evaluation of the environmental risk exposure of an investment portfolio of a central bank, under a Strategic Asset Allocation (SSA) approach. They argue that for each viable investment portfolio, a central bank should use scenarios of environmental risks and that the risk and return relationships in each scenario should be assessed based on environmental factors.

During December 2020, the American economy continued increasing employment for Mexican immigrant workers. In December employment of Mexican immigrant workers reached 6,823,729 persons and was made up of 4,540,814 men and 2,282,915 women. The improvement of such employment has strengthened the wage bill of those workers and therefore their financial resources to send remittances to Mexico.

CEMLA's Board of Governors decided to grant the 2020 Rodrigo Gómez Central Banking Award to Rogelio De La Peña Magaña for his study: "Should Monetary Policy Lean Against the Wind in a Small-Open Economy? Revisiting the Tinbergen Rule." In turn, the Governing Board recognized with honorable mentions, respectively, Luis Alejandro Rojas Bernal and Mauricio Villamizar Villegas, for their work: "Pricing the Exotic: Path-Dependent American Options with Stochastic Barriers," and Luis Simon Tamborrel for "Capital Requirements in a Model of Bank Runs: The 2008 Run on Repo."  

During November 2020, the  American economy continued increasing employment for Mexican immigrant workers. In November employment of Mexican immigrant workers reached 6,749,623 persons and was made up of 4,461,438 men and 2,288,185 women. Likewise, its unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, which was its seventh consecutive monthly decline.

The Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA) and the Banco de España held the I Course on Financial Market Infrastructures in digital format, from November 23 to 27, 2020. The Course aimed at enriching the knowledge of the participants on the design, operation, regulation and oversight of financial market infrastructures by presenting and discussing different current issues. There was a special focus on advanced analytical tools to monitor and design payment and market infrastructures, using network analysis, machine learning and asset pricing techniques. Participants discussed in a roundtable some of the main challenges facing central banks to maintain the safety and efficiency of payment systems and market infrastructures, given the developments that are taking place at the international level.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, with open access, has published a new paper on demonetization and its implications for cash demand. Dr. Alvin Hilaire, Governor of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, and his co-author, Dr. Reshma Mahabir, provide an early evaluation of a demonetization strategy to reduce financial crimes. They argue that the strategy impacted on “black money”, as over 5 per cent of the demonetized notes not being presented for exchange. The early evidence suggests that the exercise affected the demand for cash for transactions and savings.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking (open access) has published a new policy paper on fiscal sustainability. It assesses the sustainability of the Jamaican fiscal policy in the context of a recent economic reform program. It documents that Jamaica's debt is very vulnerable to sharp exchange rate depreciations and that, in the long run, a primary surplus of 4.8 percent of its GDP would be needed to achieve a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 percent.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking (open access) has published a new paper on the interplay of monetary policy and financial stability. The authors discuss the interaction of monetary policy and financial stability in emerging market economies (EMEs). They consider such a relationship in EMEs arguing that their central banks face more complex trade-offs given a strong dependence to capital inflows.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking (open access) has published a new paper on public debt sustainability. The authors assess Costa Rica's public debt sustainability empirically using three complementary approaches. One of their main results indicate that given a recent major fiscal reform, the maximum level of the debt-GDP ratio will be 68% in 2026, after which this upward trend reverses.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, which has open access, has published a new paper on analysis of macroprudential policies using DSGE models. The authors quantify the effect of macroprudential policy in mitigating domestic and foreign shocks to a small, open commodity-based economy. They find that these shocks affect large and small banks differently and that countercyclical capital buffer as well as the liquidity coverage ratio need to be introduced jointly to ensure financial stability.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, which has open access, has published a new paper on the oversight of financial market infrastructures using artificial intelligence. This article is part of a special issue of CEMLA’s Innovation Hub. The authors develop an autoencoder model (using artificial neural networks) to detect abnormal patterns in a payment system and find that these novel techniques are robust enough to identify a wide range of anomalies that could undermine the proper functioning of the payments and market infrastructures.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, which has open access, has published a new paper on financial stability analytics and systemic risk. This article is part of a special issue of CEMLA’s Innovation Hub. The authors study the connectivity of a payment network with different complex networks algorithms. The authors also find that systemic risk measures like the DebtRank and the vulnerability of banks can vary greatly over time, along with the size of the interbank exposures and patterns of connectivity.

The Latin American Journal of Central Banking, which has open access, has published a new paper on forecasting inflation with machine learning methods. The author, from Central Bank of Costa Rica, finds that the best-performing forecasts are those of deep learning long short-term memory (LSTM) models, followed by univariate k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm and, to a lesser extent, random forests.

This document aims to provide an overview of the main issues related to data gaps to facilitate the monitoring of the FinTech sector and to overcome the significant challenges towards incorporating FinTech activities in regular statistics. Moreover, the document explains the implications of data gaps on some of the central banks’ main areas, in particular, monetary policy, financial stability, payment systems, and economic activity measurement. Additionally, other implications related to the activity of BigTech companies, the impact of COVID-19 and Cybersecurity issues are explored, which represent an important challenge for data gathering at Central Banks. Also, it describes the main findings of the Irving Fisher Committee (IFC) survey “Central Banks and FinTech data ” based on the answers provided by Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, which identify their different positions regarding this topic and the current initiatives that each jurisdiction is launching. Finally, future steps are proposed based on a policy discussion and a discussion on how LAC countries could overcome data gaps and improve data collection is provided.

In October, a new increase in the employment of immigrant Mexican workers in the United States was observed, which strengthened their wage bill. In the first ten months of 2020, the wage bill for such workers reached 192 billion U.S. dollars, equivalent to 171 percent of the Mexican wage bill for insured workers at the IMSS.