Finally, compliance by Member States with the obligations under the Stability and Growth Pact is facilitated by the strong national budgetary frameworks that you want to establish within the euro area by proposing several concrete mandatory features.
To assess the degree of competition in financial markets, SBP examines market structure indicators (such as the number of institutions) or concentration (Herfindahl or other indexes) as well as the performance measures such as bank margins or profitability – though it has to be acknowledged that these variables are influenced by multiple factors ranging from macroeconomic conditions to bank specific factors such as scale of operations and risk preferences etc.