The economy Ladies and gentlemen, the euro-area economy has been expanding for 16 consecutive quarters now, and anyone looking at the purchasing managers’ index of late will even have come across headings like “Firms barely coping with demand”. The upswing, then, is turning out to be increasingly robust, and it has now spread to pretty much every single euro-area country.
With the aim of achieving its 2 percent price stability target, the Bank of Japan (hereafter the Bank) adopted quantitative and qualitative monetary easing (QQE) in April 2013. QQE was expanded further in October 2014.