“Financial Integration and Firm Performance: Evidence from Foreign Bank Entry in Emerging Markets.” Review of Finance 13, 181–223. 22  The Giovannini Group, Second Report on EU Clearing and Settlement Arrangements, April 2003. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  convergence process is not again disrupted by the financial cycle? One would hope that a better supervised and more diversified financial system will have a smoothing effect on the financial cycle. Yet, some academics argue that such is the force of the financial cycle that it is unavoidable that monetary policy will also have to play a central role in “leaning against the wind”. In the euro area, however, the situation is not quite so clear cut. The ECB’s two-pillar strategy does make financial imbalances an important element of our policy assessment, even when inflation is low. Specifically, the monetary pillar captures the connection between excess credit and liquidity creation and potential risks to future price developments, including disruptive asset price booms. And our medium-term orientation grants us a sufficiently long policy horizon to account for the financial imbalances in our strategy. In this way, it implicitly incorporates elements of a “leaning against the wind” approach. To quote the ECB Monthly Bulletin from April 2005: “[our] approach amounts to a cautious policy of ‘leaning against the wind’ of an incipient bubble. The central bank would adopt a somewhat tighter policy stance in the face of an inflating asset market than it would otherwise allow if confronted with a similar macroeconomic outlook under more normal market conditions.
The majority of countries with relatively strong GDP growth rates prior to the crisis also experienced a relatively strong downward adjustment, in some cases undoing much of the welfare gains that were achieved since the launch of the euro. Some might see this as evidence that the assumptions of the neoclassical growth model need to be qualified – that absent credit-driven growth, there is no reason to believe that euro area economies should converge towards similar levels of productivity, or even rates of productivity growth.12 Indeed, endogenous growth models allow for persistent divergences as some forms of capital exhibit non-diminishing returns. Yet, I think it is too early to draw such a conclusion. The neo-classical assumptions have not yet been properly tested, simply because capital did not flow where the marginal return would have been highest. What the euro area needs, in my view, is to “re-run” the convergence process, but with the appropriate conditions in place to ensure efficient allocation of resources, and the right framework to make convergence sustainable. Let me explain in more detail what that might entail. To begin with, catching-up economies have to address the immediate after-effects of the previous misallocation of capital. The pre-crisis inflows into the non-tradable/services sector were associated with real exchange rate appreciation, rising unit labour costs (ULC) and increasing dependence on external financing. When the financial cycle turned, however, capital flows quickly reversed.