Such a move would make services markets more open to competition. And reducing barriers to entry to more than two-thirds of the overall EU economy could provide a real boost to productivity. Labour markets and productivity Ladies and gentlemen, barriers to market entry can exert a powerful drag on productivity. But productivity is not only held back by product market regulations.
12 One development that would boost the equilibrium interest rate would be a further waning in the investor precaution that seems to have been holding back investment--in Keynesian terms, an improvement in animal spirits. The first bar in the second slide illustrates the effects on the longer-run equilibrium federal funds rate of an increase in business-sector investment equal to 1 percent of GDP.