As far as the decline of cash is concerned, the immediate response is to make sure cash will remain available to any and all that want to use it. The Bank has made clear that we will continue  Page 5  to produce it and the Government is taking powers under the Financial Services and Markets Bill to give the Bank of England and FCA new powers to ensure the future effectiveness, resilience, and sustainability of the cash ecosystem[6]. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the safest form of money, ‘public’ money, that it is to say money issued by the state for general use, will become increasingly less useful and useable and of shrinking relevance to a large part of the population. Nor can we ignore the likelihood that we will see the emergence of new forms of money, offering new possibilities and issued by new as well as established players. This raises, particularly for the Bank of England, the question of how we can continue to ensure that all of the types of money used in the UK are denominated in Sterling, remain safe and that each is interchangeable on demand and to all of the other types of money without loss of value, including publicly issued, Bank of England money. We ensure trust in money at present by regulation of the commercial banks that issue money, by requiring banks to settle amongst themselves in Bank of England money (i.e.
Hence, although the process of EU accession consists of three different phases, namely EU accession, ERM II membership and the adoption of the euro, a single common trajectory cannot be prescribed for all countries. BIS Review 84/2001  1  Such a plurality of approaches also applies to the economic experiences of accession countries over the past decade. After the rather abrupt developments at the beginning of the transition, the accession countries have generally attained macroeconomic stabilisation, and they have done so despite pursuing different policies and strategies. A remarkable process of disinflation, structural reforms and relatively sound fiscal policies have supported positive growth – which is still moderate in some cases. Despite the worldwide economic slowdown, GDP in accession countries is expected to grow at, on average, around 3.2% this year. The stabilisation success has been confirmed by the accession countries' resilience to the Asian and Russian crises in the past and, more recently, to the developments in Turkey and Argentina. No doubt, the prospect of EU accession has helped to trigger reform in the accession countries and provided an umbrella to shield them from financial turmoil. The challenges ahead, however, are still formidable: the transition agenda has not yet been completed, reforms have seen major setbacks and substantial structural differences with the euro area remain both in the real economy and in the financial sector. Today, I would like to highlight three of these challenges, which are of particular relevance to the ECB.