But even this relation - between the unemployment rate and the concept of economic slack - is not necessarily constant, and thus a given unemployment rate may not indicate the same level of slack at two separate times.
Where these partners are nation states, each of the member states of the EU acts in its own right; whenever central banks are concerned, the ECB acts as the European central bank. BIS Review 39/1998  ˝  -7-  I admit that this is a complicated arrangement. No easy answer has yet been found.