And that’s part of what the econoME materials will teach young people. 3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  3  To really bring the Bank’s work to life and give students a chance to hold us to account, colleagues below director level from around the Bank are heading into classrooms across the country. These Bank Ambassadors will visit over 200 state schools over the next twelve months. The feedback from the first 30 visits to state schools has been terrific. Central banks are not often associated with the words “positive”, “appreciated” and “inspiring” so you can imagine how invigorated our Ambassadors are when they hear them. They’ve also been challenged with the length and quality of the questions they have had to face from some students who appear to be candidates for future Treasury Select Committee membership. Our third reason for creating an education strategy is to inspire economists of the future and thereby improve diversity in finance, business and economics. We hope to convince young people of the value of studying economics. We may be a bit biased but we know it’s a fascinating subject and one that teaches skills that can open doors to a huge range of rewarding careers. And it’s achievable. As Keynes observed “the study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.” Yet, economists are still a rare breed. Last year, less than 0.1% of all GCSE students and 4% of A-level students studied economics.
I will turn to the question of three of the new expectations on central banks, that we at the ECB are currently discussing as part of the Strategic Review rightly initiated by Christine Lagarde. I. Inflation remains the principal edifice of the Central Bank's Construct I.A. The past: had inflation disappeared? When it comes to inflation, the last decade left economists and central bankers confronting a number of puzzles. The Great recession of 2008-09 exhibited a “missing deflation”, when the important contraction of output was not associated with a consequent fall of prices. The recent years, on the contrary, were characterised as a period of “missing inflation”. The vanishing level of inflation has been a pervasive and global phenomenon. It can be grasped with a simple comparison of the inflation rates in the first and the second decades of the 21st century. Page 2 sur 9  The inflation rate of the Euro area was 2.1% on average from 1999 − when the euro was created − to 2007 − when the financial crisis started. It dropped to 1.0% over the period 2013−19 following the double dip recession and until the current pandemic. At more than one percentage point, this is a substantial decline between the two periods. Headline inflation in the US experienced a similar decline, having dropped from 2.7% to 1.6% between the two periods. In the early 2000s, the euro area’s inflation rate was in line with the ECB’s price stability mandate, defined as a target of “below but close to 2%”.