31.082017  Welcome address First Annual Research Conference of the Banco de España Luis M. Linde Governor  Buenos días, good morning to everybody. Let me welcome you all to the first Annual Research Conference of the Banco de España. We plan to make this conference our main research event each year. So, we hope that today’s edition is the first of many to come. Our aim is to bring together scholars and policymakers to express views and discuss on the key policy questions for central banking, both from an academic and a practical perspective. The conference reaffirms the Banco de España’s commitment to research as an indispensable tool for economic policy-making. Good research strengthens the foundation of our policy framework and lays the groundwork for the models we use in our economic and monetary policy analysis. The Banco de España commits significant resources to research. Let me give you some figures. Currently, according to the IDEAS database, our Bank ranks third in research among national central banks in the Euro zone. In 2016, researchers at the Bank published more than 30 working papers. Indeed, research is not a matter of quantity, but of quality; in the last few years our researchers have published in top journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the various American Economic Journals and the Journal of Monetary Economics, just to mention a few examples. Over the last three years, fifteen young economists holding PhDs from renowned international universities have joined the Bank’s staff.

In this context, the Bank of Albania: reduced the policy rate to a historical low of 0.5%, in March 2020, and established the needed operational conditions to supply with sufficient liquidity to banks; provided the necessary regulatory relief and instructed banks to help enterprises and 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  households in difficulties, through the placement of a short-term moratorium on credit instalments as well as in the form of a targeted credit restructuring; temporary forfeited the commissions applied by banks on the use of electronic payment platforms and the fees applied on the interbank transactions costs for the payment systems AIPS and AECH operated by the BoA; last, we suspended the distribution of profit from commercial banks for 2020 to enable the maintaining of capital adequacy of the banking system. The stimulating measures undertaken by the Bank of Albania were coordinated with an augmented fiscal stimulus. Fiscal stimuli were in the form of tax relief and direct transfers to households and enterprises, whose income were affected by the closure of the activity and in the form of sovereign guarantees on loans to enterprises, aimed at minimising the negative effect from income and preserving the liquid position in their balance sheets. The simulating macro-economic policies helped in containing the impact of the pandemic on the real and financial sectors of Albania, and succeeded in safeguarding the macroeconomic stability uncompromised. The economic contraction, fall of employment and the damage in the financial balances of enterprises resulted lower than our initial projections.