The increased emphasis on market mechanisms is in my opinion desirable because of the gains in economic efficiency it can bring. Furthermore, it is to some extent inevitable, since the changes in technology have been making regulations increasingly easy to avoid and thus direct control over markets and their participants – albeit still necessary – increasingly hard to maintain.
Relationships between demand and supply policies The Sintra discussions about the slow post-crisis recovery and the role that investment played in it suggest that both supply and demand policies have a role to play, depending on the country and time considered. But demand and supply policies do not need to be substitutes: they can be complements.