The aim is not only to cement global economic recovery, but also to counter the backtracking seen in inequality and poverty as a result of this pandemic and to jointly tackle the common structural challenges derived from digitalisation and the fight against climate change. And this without forgetting the need to strengthen pre-emptive and common response mechanisms to systemic crises like the present one. In this respect, the G20 resolutions reached to respond to the impact of the crisis on lowincome economies via debt-relief measures are praiseworthy; but consensus must now be forged to address the situation which middle-income countries are also facing (a category in which a good number of the Ibero-American community countries fit), with limited room for manoeuvre in their national policies. With these same objectives, international institutions must complement and improve coordination with regional institutions and mechanisms, which may be more effective in providing solutions for countries that share a common institutional framework or similar economic structures. Following this introduction, allow me to move on to the first panel of the Conference, which will focus on analysing the role of monetary policy in the context of the pandemic.
Perfectly illustrating this flexibility in the distribution of purchases over time is the fact that the average monthly pace of purchases in the April-June period was € billion, whereas from October to December, against a backdrop of greater easing in sovereign debt markets, average monthly purchases barely exceeded € billion. Thanks to this flexibility, along with the large volume of asset purchases initially envisaged, the announcement of the creation of the PEPP on 18 March helped substantially reduce sovereign yields in the euro area, particularly in countries such as Italy and Spain. These countries had relatively high levels of public debt and were also more affected by the first wave of the virus, both in epidemiological terms and given their dependence on more vulnerable sectors such as tourism and hospitality. The outcome was a much more pronounced increase in financing costs in these countries, that the PEPP’s flexibility has enabled us to counter by ensuring a smooth transmission of our monetary policy to all euro area countries. This flexibility is again proving particularly useful in the current situation. Indeed, after extending our programme last December, there was a rise in long-term interest rates in a setting in which our inflation forecast was some distance off target and below that expected before the crisis.