Also, they have not escaped the trend towards fragmentation which has been a common feature of euro area capital markets throughout this crisis. During the euro area sovereign bond market crisis, and especially in the second half of 2011, country-specific developments were increasingly apparent.
In particular, the rising yield spread between French and German bonds meant that the euro area real yield curve estimated on French and German bonds became biased. The technical solution was to split the estimation of the real yield curve into the country-specific yield curves before aggregating back to a euro area real yield curve.