4  See the BIS publication “Consultative Document -Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets – constraints on the use of internal model approaches”, http://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d362.pdf  9 [12]  Time to start a review of Sweden's special national requirements Some of the special Swedish requirements have arisen over the years following the financial crisis, as Finansinspektionen and other Swedish authorities have assessed that Swedish banks need more capital than the current minimum requirement supplies. These special Swedish requirements are thus not the result of international agreements. It is therefore reasonable that we should review our current special national requirements when Basel III will be introduced in full in Sweden, especially in the perspective that Basel III will imply higher minimum requirements of the major Swedish banks than before. Although no decision has yet been made on when Basel III shall be fully implemented in Sweden, my assessment is that we will have plenty of time to review our special national requirements and assess what level they should be at when Basel III is introduced in Sweden. One conclusion of this analysis may be that today’s CET 1 capital requirement of 18 per cent of risk-weighted assets for the major Swedish banks in total needs to be changed in future. Under these circumstances it is too early to make any precise analysis of how, for instance, Swedish GDP will develop or how borrowers’ interest rates will be affected by the coming changes in the regulations.
And in some countries, the process of catching-up in real incomes has been slower than expected at the start of transition. For acceding countries as a whole, per capita income today is less than half of the average of the EU. Given the low starting point for most countries, increasing prosperity and living standards will be a major policy objective for quite some time. In view of that strategic objective, one has to underline that prudent macroeconomic policies are key to support and facilitate progress towards higher GDP-per-capita levels. Accession to the EU is expected to have positive effects on the countries' prospects for convergence. The full integration into the internal market will increase growth prospects and thus foster the catching-up process, mainly through trade and investment (FDI), together with lower interest rates. New Member States will have to implement and enforce the “acquis communautaire” of the European Union, which they have adopted in the course of recent years (excluding, for the time being, those areas where transitional arrangements apply). The EU has also been preparing intensively to make enlargement work. Within the realm of central banking, the Eurosystem has been engaged since 1999 in a constructive and ever more intensive dialogue with the central banks of the new Member States. Already since the signing of the EU Accession Treaty in 2003, the Governors of the national central banks of acceding countries have been taking part as observers in the General Council of the ECB.