Skip to main content

Data Revision of the Flow of Funds Accounts

March 23, 2012
Bank of Japan
Research and Statistics Department

The Bank of Japan releases retroactively revised figures of the Flow of Funds Accounts (hereafter the FFA) every March. The revised figures reflect the updated information on source data, the financial system, and legislations. Today, the Bank has posted retroactively revised fiscal-year and quarterly data from the second quarter of 2001 in the "BOJ Time-Series Data Search."

This revision focuses on three sectors: Securities investment trusts, Life insurance, and Finance companies. These sectors play an important role in the financial flow outside the banking system, and their behavior draws attention of financial markets. In the revised FFA, which offers an overview of financial markets in terms of statistics, performances of each sector can be captured more accurately.

The revised FFA has also begun to provide time series data of "From-whom-to-whom presentation of domestic debt securities by issuer sectors."

The main points of the revision are as follows:

i) Securities investment trusts sector

Treasury discount bills held by the sector---which was previously included in item "Central government securities and FILP bonds"---is now recorded as an independent item ("Treasury discount bills"). Also, some data series are revised to reflect new source data of fund-of-funds, which are regarded as intra-sector transactions.

ii) Life insurance sector

The amounts of investment in securities by life insurance sector were estimated from source data based on various evaluation methods. They are now reestimated by using new source data, which has enabled the Bank to evaluate the amounts with a single method.

iii) Finance companies sector

Sample data are added to obtain more robust estimates of the behavior of the money lending industry, which has gone through industrial reorganization recently. Also, data on venture capital are added to this sector.

iv) Release of new data series

"From-whom-to-whom presentation of domestic debt securities by issuer sectors"---which was rearranged from its original in the FFA---was previously available only in Japanese. The data series are now available in the English page of "BOJ Time-Series Data Search" from March 1980 onwards.

Inquiries

Financial Statistics Group, Economic Statistics Division, Research and Statistics Department

E-mail : post.rsd5@boj.or.jp