The same of course holds true for the UK. Some mixed signals emerged from some accession countries, the most lately being the Czech Republic and most alarmingly Poland. Independence of central banks is, as you know, declined at least in two different forms.
At the centre of this debate is the question of how to raise potential output growth, which has slowed from around 2% in OECD countries in 2000 to around 1% today.1 Without stronger potential growth, the cyclical recovery we are now seeing globally will ultimately converge downwards to those slower growth rates.