But if the economics literature is right about the greater impact of new technology on the distribution of income, at least in the US, how many would say we should tax computer investment? The distribution of the benefits: I want to end this section with something else the early economists would recognise – that, whatever it has done to widen the distribution of income, free trade with labour-rich countries can have significantly progressive effects on prices. In their early writings on international trade the classical economists reserved particular hostility for the Corn Laws. Introduced after the Napoleonic Wars, in the midst of an economic downturn, these measures imposed heavy restrictions and tariffs on agricultural imports. The result was a much higher price of food, benefiting agricultural landowners  14  and penalising the less well-off, for whom food was the major part of  their consumption. Their eventual repeal in 1846, a landmark in Britain’s move towards (and support for) free trade in the second half of the century, owed much to the intellectual arguments of the classical economists. But it also came about because of what those restrictions meant for the poor. 11  See for example Acemoglu (1998) and Behar (2013). There are some obvious historical exceptions to this support. In 1779, there was a spate of “anti-machinery” riots. In one of them, Richard Arkwright’s new mill in Birkacre, in Lancashire, was destroyed. Thirty years later the “Luddites”, formed mainly of textile workers, also sought to destroy labour-replacing weaving machinery.
Denis Beau: From open banking to open finance Speech by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the France Payments Forum “The Europe of banking and financial services” – Paris Europlace – France Innovation, Paris, 24 March 2022. * * * Technological innovations, changes in demand, the arrival of new players: the changes underway in the financial sector are providing a strong impetus to relax the conditions of access to the market, in order to foster competition and thus encourage the development of new, more efficient and less costly services. In Europe, in the field of payments, this relaxation has already occurred. The EMD, the PSD1 and finally the PSD2 directives have all resulted in the emergence of more agile players, particularly in terms of data exploitation. The pressure to open up data now extends to insurance and savings: after open banking, we now speak of open finance. This pressure calls for further adapting the regulatory framework. But what should our guiding principles be? In the payments sector, the main objective of the directives I mentioned was to reconcile openness and security. While this challenge remains relevant for the transition from open banking to open finance, with digitalisation and the development of the platform economy, we have seen two other challenges emerge: reconciling innovation and integration on the one hand and competition and sovereignty on the other.