The Board of Directors of the Banco de la República does not have a target or a preferred level for the exchange rate. When the Banco de la República intervened in the foreign exchange market between September 2004 and May 2007, it always sterilized those interventions.
This gradual upward trend is expected to continue, not least owing to our monetary policy measures. But productivity growth has remained very subdued. In 1995, productivity growth in the euro area was on a par with the rest of the world at about 2%.