2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  The effective lower bound on interest rates Moving to the second challenge – the effective lower bound – recent evidence suggests that real neutral rates have fallen to very low levels, driven by both cyclical and structural forces.
This, however, wasn’t caused by the high inflation rates and low flexibility of the labour market, but reflected the low unemployment rate in the Netherlands in that period. For many years, the unemployment rate in the Netherlands was the lowest in the euro area.