Government expenditure on R&D is relatively modest, at only one-half a percentage point of GDP, compared to 0.7 percent, on average, in the OECD, or 0.9 percent in the US.
In my remarks I would like to address what I see as the key challenge in the euro area today: how to fix the flow of credit to the real economy. During the crisis the credit transmission channel has become impaired in three mutuallyreinforcing ways. First, as regards quantity, aggregate loan growth continues its steady deceleration and remains very heterogeneous across the euro area.