The purpose of these remarks is certainly not to suggest that central banks should abstain from direct lending to the real sector, but rather to point out that the number of aspects to consider before doing so are so many and of such complexity that no central bank would ever take such a decision with a light heart.
The prolonged periods of subdued growth that Japan and Italy suffered since the early 1990s have been driven by a deceleration in productivity, a phenomenon common to many developed and developing nations but more marked in the case of Japan and Italy. In Italy we observed a substantial delay in responding to the significant changes brought by globalisation and technological progress.