A one standard deviation rise in a country’s “economic complexity” has been found to increase its long-term growth rate by a remarkable 1.6% per year. If these numbers are even roughly right, this product atlas is a fantastic navigation device. It could help guide countries towards investing in their most profitable industries. Because it also shows how closely product types are linked, both within and across countries, product and country complexity maps might also be used to help chart a course for industrial policy and international trade. The web is a higher-dimension network than the global supply chain. Navigating it is more complex still. Early in its life, that seemed likely to retard its progress. In the early 1990s, web  16  Chandran (2003). 17  Hausmann et al (2011). 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  search engines relied on the content of each page to determine its relevance. As the web grew, simple keyword search was being overwhelmed by the web’s size and complexity. By the mid-1990s, search engines were lost in navigation. In 1996, two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, devised a solution.18 You are all now familiar with its name. It was called “BackRub”. Page and Brin saw the links between websites, rather than the content within them, as the key to navigating the web. Using that basic intuition, they created a search algorithm which calculated a ranking of the relative importance of every web page in the global network. This ranking is known as PageRank.
Concluding remarks In closing, I would like to return to our decision of 15 January. Discontinuing the minimum exchange rate and reducing interest rates further are monetary policy measures for which there are no better alternatives. As I outlined previously, since the introduction of the minimum exchange rate in September 2011, the international currency relationships have changed fundamentally. In view of this development, a minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 per euro was no longer sustainable. Over the long term, adhering to the minimum exchange rate would have jeopardised the SNB’s ability to conduct monetary policy and fulfil its mandate in future. This would have saddled the Swiss economy with longer-term costs that would have been out of all proportion to the benefits of continuing to enforce the minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 per euro. With the international low interest rate environment, monetary policy faces big challenges. Overall, the Swiss franc is significantly overvalued. Negative interest helps to make investments in Swiss francs less attractive and thereby correct this overvaluation over time. The SNB will continue to take account of the exchange rate situation, and its impact on inflation and economic developments, in formulating its monetary policy. It will therefore remain active in the foreign exchange market, as necessary, in order to influence monetary conditions. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention. 4  BIS central bankers’ speeches