Among them: the setting-up of an European Monetary Fund, which would take over the current functions of the European Stabilization Mechanism, eventually adding the role of common backstop for the Single Resolution Fund; the establishment of an European Minister of Finance, who would also be Vice-President of the European Commission and Chairman of the Eurogroup; and the creation of a common stabilisation tool for investment, which should not preclude the future development of a genuine European budgetary capacity for economic stabilisation purposes. Those are proposals that deserve careful consideration. Moreover, the crisis has made it clear that the European budgetary framework is very complex, which highlights the need to simplify it. Recent proposals, which seek to reduce the current excessive number of rules, by focusing on the public debt to GDP ratio, as a medium-term anchor, and to the expenditure rule, as an operational tool, seem promising. In any event, reinforcing the oversight and control of fiscal rules is necessary to ensure their fulfilment. The aim should be that the budgetary governance framework is able to encourage countries to generate room for manoeuvre during expansionary phases, so that the stabilising capacity of fiscal policy may increase in the euro area, as a whole, at times of crisis. 8/9  Summing up: much work remains to be done in the coming months and years. We should make good use of the current benign environment to progress in our European integration agenda.
In the last five years, the unemployment rate decreased to 16.5% at the end of 2017, more than 10 pp below its peak at the beginning of 2013. Despite these positive developments, unemployment is still at unacceptably high levels, in fact, the second highest in the euro area after Greece. The high incidence of long-term unemployment, which now stands above 50%, is signalling the risks of hysteresis in the labour market, which would make the reduction of the unemployment rate to pre-crisis levels more difficult. From a longer perspective, the Spanish economy also faces three important challenges. First, even at the height of the last expansion in 2006, Spain had an unemployment rate of 8.2% which was far off the best performers at that time. Second, during recent decades, 5/9  the segmentation of the Spanish labour market has been very marked, with a temporary rate exceeding 25%, 10 pp above euro area averages, which contributes to exacerbating the volatility of employment and reducing productivity growth. Third, the Spanish economy should be ready to accommodate the worldwide process of automation of certain tasks, especially in a context in which the incidence of low-skills unemployment is high and the labour market is not flexible enough.