Survey evidence points to further improvements in economic activity at the beginning of this year so that the economic recovery should gradually broaden and strengthen. And in January, the euro area unemployment rate dropped to the lowest level observed since August 2012. Of course, these improvements cannot and should not solely be attributed to our monetary easing.
But our monetary policy is certainly supporting the recovery. This is also reflected in the ECB staff macroeconomic projections that we published last week. In those projections, expectations for real GDP have been revised upwards, both for 2015 and 2016, relative to the previous exercise.