Certainly we need to reform the system to try to ensure greater stability - and a great deal of effort has been expended on precisely that over the past few years - by developing standards and codes of best practice by national authorities, for example, designed to help them to help themselves to take greater advantage of the opportunities presented by globalisation. More certainly needs to be - and is being - done, recognising the particular problems facing different countries at different stages of development. But it would be a terrible mistake to turn the clock back and retreat from “globalisation” into a world of nation states linked together predominantly by official financing. None of the poorer countries themselves are arguing for that, yet that is what some of the protests seem to imply. And so it is with some of the more specific issues - like pushing for higher labour standards in developing countries, which is fine up to a point, but if pushed too far could mean lower activity and higher unemployment in those countries; or debt forgiveness not tied to programs designed to improve the lot of the people living in the debtor countries; or the appropriateness of particular development projects and so on - we cannot simply focus on particular aspects of the problem in isolation, we need to examine both the pros and the cons in each case to try to find the best means to what is quite likely to be an agreed end.
Let me comment briefly on these two points. As regards the lack of structural reforms, I hope that my previous remarks have underlined that the euro countries have clearly embarked on major structural reforms - triggered by the single market and the single currency - that will bear lasting effects on the functioning of their economies. The central banks of Europe call for the pursuit and reinforcement of these reforms. At the same time, in order to serve these economies in the most efficient way, the euro financial markets are experiencing the deep and rapid integration process that I described previously. On the second point, one has to keep in mind that the American and European economies are not positioned identically in the economic cycle, as the latter are probably at the beginning of a more robust phase of expansion. According to IMF forecasts, growth should reach 3% in the euro area in 2001, compared with 3.2% in the US. From a central banking perspective, the present situation is clearly characterized by a misalignment of the euro if one refers to the euro area fundamentals: robust domestic growth, inflation under control, strong domestic savings, healthy external accounts. We are, to a certain extent, in a situation symmetric to that which prevailed in 1995 when the weakness of the dollar was clearly out of line with the fundamentals of the US economy. At that time, it took a few months before a correction appeared that aligned the dollar with its economic underlying fundamentals.