In reality, as Peter Praet – member of the Executive Board of the ECB – mentioned a few days ago, “it is abnormal that the supervision responsibility is collective but the consequences, if something goes wrong, go back to the national authorities.” 4.
Against this background, I will first review the past economic growth performance of the euro area, focusing on some of the underlying factors of potential output growth, namely labour resource utilisation (or labour supply), hourly labour productivity and demographic trends, in particular in comparison to the US.