Dimitar Bogov: Challenges of countries from South-Eastern Europe in the current economic and financial turbulence in the euro area Opening speech by Mr Dimitar Bogov, Governor of the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia, at the NBRM conference on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the monetary independence of the Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 27 April 2012. *  *  *  Dear Deputy Prime Minister, dear ministers, distinguished Governors, Your Excellences, dear guests, colleagues and friends It is an honor to greet you and wish you welcome to this conference, which is a part of the activities for marking the 20th anniversary of the monetary independence of the Republic of Macedonia. The last two decades of monetary independence, the Republic of Macedonia has faced, and in our opinion, successfully addressed many challenges. Our twentieth anniversary takes place in exceptionally turbulent developments of global economy, particularly marked by events triggered by the euro area debt crisis. This means that as the other central banks from the region, we face a new challenge. Taking into account the timing of the conference, its topic came quite spontaneously, and therefore we consider that it will raise interesting discussion of current issues of the central banks of the South-Eastern Europe and beyond.
As he wrote in his autobiography, “When I first went to Germany I seemed to breathe a new and exhilarating atmosphere of freedom … [which] did not exist in [American universities]” (Ely, 1938). Two journeys, separated by a hundred years, reveal much about what occurred in Europe and America between them. Upon his return, Ely “undertook to draw up a project for the formation of a society to be called ‘The American Economic Association’, which should be broad enough to appeal to all the younger economists who, irrespective of their personal views, felt the stirring of the new life in economics”. His actions helped the AEA to develop into the great institution it is today. I have the privilege to work for another great institution, the Bank of England. And, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Ely’s birth, I thought it would be appropriate to choose as the theme of my lecture today the role that institutions play in the conduct of monetary policy. In brief, I want to argue that the core of the monetary policy problem is uncertainty about future social decisions resulting from the impossibility and the undesirability of committing our successors to any given monetary policy strategy. The impossibility stems from the observation that collective decisions cannot be enforced so that it is impossible to commit to future collective decisions; the undesirability reflects the fact that we cannot articulate all possible future states of the world.