Lastly, we need to make progress towards an economic governance of the euro area; in France, we spoke of “economic government”. This progress is essential, regardless of whether or not the United Kingdom remains in the European Union; naturally, I would like it to stay in. This is not a purely institutional question; it is not about “more Brussels” but very concretely about more growth and employment. Indeed, economists estimate that the current lack of coordination of national economic policies has cost Europeans between two and five percentage points of GDP since 2011. Naturally, contrary to the case of monetary policy, the aim is not to fully integrate all of our economic policies at the European level, but to achieve a “full coordination” of fiscal and structural policies. For this, we need to have shared economic goals, and a true “collective strategy” for the euro area, in which each country has a role to play to improve everyone’s situation. This requires trust, in particular between France and Germany, based on a clear pact: national reforms and (not or) European coordination. This full coordination also rests on the setting up of a strong and legitimate European institution: a euro area Finance Minister backed by a European Treasury system and subject to greater democratic accountability. This Finance Minister would be charged with defining the collective strategy, supervising its decentralised implementation by Member States and managing crisis management tools. Going forward, he/she could also be in charge of a common budget.
The new comprehensive package of measures that we adopted on 10 March 2016 reflects two main objectives: first, to return to inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. This is not the case at present since inflation stood at –0.2% in the euro area in February, taking account of the sharp decline in oil prices, but it should return to positive territory in the second half of 2016. The other objective is to bolster the financing of the real economy and to protect it from the pressures related to market volatility. The new series of targeted refinancing operations extension of the asset purchase programme, for its part, will be of particular benefit to large French corporations. We are convinced that these additional measures will deliver concrete results, as did the successive measures we have implemented since June 2014. The latter have indeed boosted lending to businesses, while lowering the cost of credit, and made a 0.3% contribution to French growth in 2015, or even 0.4% according to INSEE. This represents about 80,000 additional jobs for the economy. We are therefore consistent in our objective, and ready to act using the right instruments. But we also remain vigilant as to the possible risks that our monetary policy could generate.