Peter Praet: The financial cycle and real convergence in the euro area Speech by Mr Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies, Washington DC, 10 April 2014. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen1 Thank you for inviting me to address this conference. The latest data confirm that the euro area on aggregate is proceeding slowly along the path of economic recovery. Yet, a key issue that faces policymakers today, and that will continue to face them for several years to come, is how to deal with persistent divergence between national economies. Some euro area countries are experiencing steady growth, while in others growth remains anaemic. Some have unemployment rates under 5%, while in others unemployment exceeds 25%. In the euro area, which is a monetary union but not a formal political union, there are risks if such divergences remain unaddressed. Without fiscal equalisation mechanisms, real economic convergence is important to gradually reduce cross-country income gaps, and this in turn ensures the economic and social cohesion of the single currency. This issue of real convergence is what I would like to focus on in my remarks today – in particular, why the first decade of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) failed to produce real convergence, and how the euro area can produce a sustainable convergence process going forward. My main argument is as follows.
Anita Angelovska Bezhoska: Payments in the digital era - inside out Speech by Ms Anita Angelovska Bezhoska, Governor of the National Bank of the Republic of North Macedonia, at the 13th Conference on Payments and Market Infrastructures, jointly organised by the National Bank of North Macedonia and the Netherlands Bank, Ohrid (digitally), 9 December 2021. * * * Dear Governor Knot, Minister Besimi, Dear speakers and participants It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our traditional conference on Payments in the Digital Era: Inside Out, hosted by our central bank together with the Dutch Central Bank, for which I express my deep gratitude to governor Knot and his colleagues. Our lives are becoming increasingly digital as a result of the proliferation of new technologies that transform public and private services making them more convenient and accessible to consumers. As our lives have gone digital, so have our payments. The digitalisation of consumer payment behaviour, which has been going on for years, has been accelerated by the pandemics that shifted it in a higher gear. Globally, last year cash payments declined by 16%, while the number of non-cash transactions increased by 6%. The pandemics has particularly accelerated the shift towards real time/instant payments that grew by 40%. In the euro area, according to the ECB survey on payment attitudes (2020)1, 40% of the respondents stated that since the onset of the pandemic they have used less cash and more cards (contactless in particular).