Historically, the most drastic processes of deleveraging, including the post-war episodes and the recent post-crisis episode in the US, have relied on both mechanisms. But the contribution of nominal growth has always been decisive for success. In the euro area, until recently, real growth and inflation were too low to foster macroeconomic deleveraging, so balance sheet repair had to take place through the more painful channel, conflicting with the objective of macroeconomic stabilisation. Rising nominal growth is now helping to reconcile those two goals. Nevertheless, further efforts are still needed to work through the legacies of the crisis, especially in parts of the euro area banking sector where nonperforming loans remain high. The third important feature of the recovery is its broadness across sectors and countries – which is to say, it has not only strengthened but become more homogenous across the euro area. This reflects above all the effectiveness of our measures in narrowing financing conditions across different economies. If one looks at the percentage of all sectors in all euro area countries that have positive growth, the figure stood above 80% at the end of last year – above its historical average of 73% and the level observed during the 2009–11 recovery. Similarly, the dispersion in growth rates across both sectors and countries has also narrowed significantly and both are now at their lowest level since 1997. The same story is visible for employment. In early 2014 the vast majority of euro area headcount growth was coming from Germany.
2 See Draghi (2015), “Monetary Policy: Past, Present and Future”, speech at the Frankfurt European Banking  Congress, 20 November 2015. 3 Using the Phillips curve approach presented in Box 2 of the ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 3 / 2016. 6/6  BIS central bankers' speeches