At a time when globalisation may leave many behind in advanced economies, when the debate about inequalities is coming back to the forefront – and these are real challenges behind the populist wave –, now is not the moment to give up our social model. Europe and Japan are quite close in their choices. How to move forward: four accelerators of the Economic Union. The assets that I have presented constitute a valuable achievement for Europe. Now, we must actively build on them, and not lazily rest on our laurels. I will now present some avenues of improvement. Indeed, we have clearly succeeded in building a Monetary Union, but this is not sufficient. It is now time to make concrete progress on Economic Union, on which we have not been very effective yet. We are in agreement on the "why". Monetary policy cannot be the only game in town, and therefore we should not overburden it. Furthermore we aim at greater stability, to counter the risk of a new crisis befalling an unprotected euro area, with all its damaging political and economic repercussions; and  Page 5 sur 6 greater growth, to catch up our past lag on the United States and finally treat the fatal disease of mass unemployment in Europe. As for the “when”, we obviously have a unique historic opportunity: with the economic recovery; with the new French President and also stable governments in the Netherlands and hopefully in Germany.
No decision has yet been made regarding its issuance or its final design, but we launched the investigation phase of the project last year in order to ensure we are prepared in the event that future developments warrant its launch. Our work is now focused on deepening the conceptual analysis by assessing the different design options, as well as the distribution model. The first step was to identify the use cases to focus on, namely those that better support the policy objectives of a digital euro and facilitate network effects. Payments in e-commerce and physical stores, as well as person-to-person payments are, clearly, natural candidates. They either represent important market segments or have a clear potential to grow, and they rely heavily either on cash or on non-European providers and technologies. Payments between governments and individuals have also been considered a priority, given their potential synergies with the aforementioned ones. In any case, focusing now on these payment segments does not mean ruling out others, but simply leaving them for future stages. The next step of the analysis has covered what we consider to be the foundational design options. They refer to the way a digital euro should be transferred, the level of privacy and the tools to control excessive use and, hence, limit its impact on the stability of the financial system.