ABSTRACT
The oldest research departments were instituted in the three central banks on which much of European financial history in the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth century turned: the Bank of England, the Bank of France and the Bank of Germany. The Bank of France took due note of its lack of preparedness and of its lag in relation to the Bank of England, and it concluded that the reason for this was that it did not have a true statistical research service. The upshot was the creation in 1894 of its Bureau des tudes conomiques. The Bank of Greece Economic Research Section was created in May 1928, to advise the Banks' management on monetary policy matters and the analysis of the country's general economic situation. The year the Servizio Studi Economici e Statistica was created was 1926 but, as Tuccimei indicates, economic research in the Italian central bank should be dated back further to its very origins.
