European leaders are strongly committed to addressing these issues and have begun to make some progress on them, but the need to obtain agreement among a large number of euro-zone countries to be able to put in place necessary backstops, as well as difficulties involved in addressing the fiscal imbalances in some of these countries, has slowed the process of developing and implementing solutions.
The description of the priority sectors was formalised in 1972 on the basis of the report submitted by the Informal Study Group on Statistics relating to advances to the Priority Sectors constituted by the Reserve Bank in May 1971.