Early Warning System for Economic and Financial Risks in Kazakhstan

This paper proposes a macro-prudential financial soundness analysis that can be used by most developing and transformation countries with or without crisis experience as well as by developed countries with limited data. The objective is to detect economic and financial sector vulnerability, design appropriate remedial policy responses and undertake preventing actions to address vulnerabilities. The paper also discusses a process for identifying and compiling a set of leading macro-prudential indicators. The system will be tested using a case study referring to Kazakhstan. The main novelty of the study lies in designing composite indicators for the real economy, the banking sector, the overall financial sector and finally the international economic environment of Kazakhstan and in studying the interaction of these composite indicators. An additional innovation is the relatively extensive use of qualitative business survey data to monitor vulnerability or crises; these surveys are data which until now have not been used much in this area of research.