By contrast, however, Martin Feldstein has argued that digitalisation and the Internet revolution mean that we are underestimating growth because numerous services are now being provided more or less free of charge via the internet.6 The flipside of this argument is: the official price statistics overestimate the true rate of inflation. This isn’t a new topic, too. It was already discussed in the 1990s.
This is of course a concern to us. We don’t live in an ivory tower. But we have a mandate and this mandate is for the 18 euro area countries as a whole. But I also think there are a lot of misunderstandings and unjustified fears in Germany.