The euro area, like many other advanced economies, has entered an era of drastic demographic change. Without appropriate policy responses, population ageing in the euro area is posing formidable challenges for potential growth, monetary policy and public finances. This paper examines - from a...

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, discussions were already taking place on how to complete Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and increase its resilience, inter alia, by speeding up economic convergence. The impact of the current unprecedented crisis on the euro area...

Since the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2003 strategy review, the importance of macro-financial amplification channels for monetary policy has increasingly gained recognition. This paper takes stock of this evolution and discusses the desirability of further incremental enhancements in the...

The aim of this report is to foster a better understanding of past trends in, and drivers of, productivity growth in the countries of the European Union (EU) and of the interplay between productivity and monetary policy. To this end, a group of experts from 15 national central banks and the...

Asset encumbrance is a central concept in the context of banks’ liquidity crises, as it is associated with their capacity to obtain secured funding. This occasional paper summarises the work carried out by the task force on asset encumbrance, bringing together analyses by the ECB and those...

This paper looks at the macroeconomic impact of the two policies proposed by ECB Banking Supervision to tackle the high share of non-performing loans (NPLs) on the balance sheets of euro area banks. The first is the coverage expectations for new NPLs set out in the Addendum to the ECB's NPL...