The second stylised fact that I would like to stress, which is relevant for the conduct of the single monetary policy of the ECB, is that the degree of synchronisation of business cycles across the euro area countries seems to have increased since the beginning of the 1990s.
This finding holds for various measures of synchronisation applied to overall economic activity, for annual and quarterly data, as well as for various country groupings. Also last year, the strengthening of activity and the rebound in the euro area’s real GDP growth was a very widely shared phenomenon across the various countries within the euro area.