4 See Gropp, R. and C. Kok (2017), “Competition and contestability in bank retail markets”, forthcoming in  Handbook on Competition in Banking and Finance (eds. J. Bikker and L. Spierdijk), Edward Elgar Publishing. 5 See ECB Financial Integration in Europe, May 2017. The report also provides an in-depth review of the literature  studying the costs and benefits of bank consolidation.
Subsequent market events have certainly proven me correct, haven’t they? In fact, the country faced two major challenges. First, volatile international prices of oil and non-oil commodities which caused inflation to accelerate globally, particularly in the first half of the year.