Let me begin though by highlighting that if I would have told you 5 years ago that today at this very Symposium ”Bankenaufsicht im Dialog”, we would spend half the day discussing sustainability, not only would none of you have believed me, but most likely many of you would have taken me for a sort of tree hugger rather than a central banker.
Compared to the advanced countries, productivity here is low and the service sector lacking in competitiveness, while the environmental problems arising from our long period of rapid growth until now impose constraints on our abilities to continue growing at reasonable levels in the future.