Today, the euro area economy benefits from benchmark long-term market interest rates below 4%, a level which most issuers have never seen in the last fifty years.
In Italy the 10-year interest rate spread versus the best performers fell from 4.5 percentage points at the beginning of 1996 to 0.3 percentage points at the beginning of 1998 and to 0.2 percentage points at the end of 2004 [see Chart 1]. These two major achievements must be maintained by today’s and future economic policy making.