It is therefore extremely important that the Commission services charged with conducting macroeconomic and fiscal surveillance for the euro area be sufficiently independent, ideally supported by a body of “wise persons” providing external assessments. We are now at a stage where we need to remain bold and enact those reforms that we envisaged when the crisis was at its deepest.
It is obvious that we have become more dependent on the large emerging economies, especially China and Russia. Given the growing importance of both Russia and China, it is interesting that within both the EU, and also the euro area, different countries still have different economic ties with these two emerging giants. Partially these differences are driven by geography, partly by economic structure.