CONFIDENTIAL
the Bank of England for an assessment of the creditworthiness of a particular developing country. But an average JIC(EA) report will take between three and six months to complete, and is intended to serve as a work of reference and background for the formation of political as well as economic and financial policy.over the medium term.
4. Reports are drafted by the Assessments Staff on the basis of inputs provided by Departments and the Bank of England. These inputs may include material from covert sources, especially in relation to Soviet and Communist bloc countries.
5. From time to time previous JIC(EA) assessments are updated or revised. It is up to individual Departments to propose this in the light of their own requirements. There are no systematic arrangements for review of papers once they have been issued, nor is there any regular feedback from Departments to the centre as a basis for assessing the value of papers produced.
6. As a result of successive staff cuts, there are now not enough people in the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff the same is true of Department of Economic and Logistic Intelligence in MOD - to provide an in-depth, worldwide and timely service to customers. The capacity to assess economic intelligence has been so reduced that a demand for an urgent study nowadays means that other priority work has to be deferred; and the lead time for studies is often so great that the requirements may well have altered by the time a study has been produced. Events may have overtaken the assessment. At present the staff cannot provide Ministers and other customers with a comprehensive and timely economic assessment capability across the board.
7. An obvious option is reinforcement of the economic Assessments Staff in the Cabinet Office (and DELI). This would be the logical response to a situation in which departmental demands for economic assessment and analysis, particularly of the non-Communist world, exceed the ability of the Cabinet Office to respond. It does however pre-suppose that JIC(EA)'s present role is well suited to
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