While the EPC, the European Payments Council, is in the driving seat and the European Commission can provide legal framework for payments and pressure for more competition to keep the momentum, the ECB’s role is to analyse the issues at stake, offer a platform for debate discussion and to convince audiences of the advantages of a single market for payments – and this is the reason why I am here today.
As one recent commentator put it, work such as Douglas’s was part of “a growing literature , , , [that] played an important role in shaping the approach to combining statistical methods and economic theory that would become the standard econometric practice in the later decades of the 20th century. "1 But, of course, Paul Douglas was much more than an economist.