The European Union and its monetary union are regional projects with global implications. This is firstly due to the size of Europe in the global economy. Though the euro area has not made a major contribution to world growth over the past seven or eight years, it nonetheless accounts for 17% of global GDP and 16% of global trade.
When the integrity of the euro area was under threat, so too was global prosperity. Christine Lagarde, who has chaired many IMF gatherings where the first topic under discussion was the euro area, can testify to that. By the same token, the return of the euro area economy to sustained growth, under the impulse of our monetary policy, is good news for everybody, everywhere.