Other experts can describe this area better and in more depth than I do here, but to me it seems obvious that increasing numbers of us will have develop our skills further several times in the courses of our professional lives. The other important policy area is that of competition oversight and regulation. New technology brings new actors and some of these have become very large global actors. In markets characterised by high entrance barriers, synergies and network effects, far too much power can easily be concentrated in the hands of a  Flodberg and Lööf, Staff Memo, December 2017. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapporter/staffmemo/svenska/2017/staff_memo_171220_1_sv_sfx829la.pdf  4  4 [5]  few dominant actors. National politicians play an important part here: in cooperation with other countries, they must oversee and, when necessary, regulate different markets to safeguard the public interest. The contribution of monetary policy At present, we can observe that the very low level of interest rates and the Riksbank’s asset purchases have had clear effects. Inflation, which has shown a rising trend since 2014, was around 2 per cent last year and long-term expectations are anchored to the target. The Swedish labour market is moving in the right direction and employment has increased by 240,000 over the last three years. But unemployment for those born abroad remains high. Refugees settling in Sweden often lack a strong link to the labour market when they arrive. Only half of refugees are in employment after eight years in Sweden.

Otherwise, such differences might become a source of financial fragmentation in their own right. Neither of these criteria is easy to fulfil. As the experience with Lehman Brothers has demonstrated, failures of large, integrated financial institutions can have devastating consequences for economic stability. Risks of contagion from one institution to entire financial sectors greatly complicate any effort to establish a more symmetric risk and rewardstructure for banks. Harmonising financial sector policies across countries in turn requires substantial operational and legislative efforts, given that national institutions have evolved separately and are now heterogeneous in many regards. All these difficulties can be addressed and, in fact, they are being addressed by European policy-makers. In particular, the recent initiatives at European level comprise several crucial steps to achieving a more incentive-compatible as well as a more integrated and coherent framework among countries. Let me elaborate on several concrete elements. The first step is the establishment of a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). The SSM aims to ensure that all supervisory decisions about euro area banks are taken in a consistent and stringent manner, independently of the country in which it is located. Once fully effective, this will reassure markets that all banks face the same scrutiny and thus will counteract financial market fragmentation in the euro area. Moreover, by delegating supervisory decisions from the country to the euro area level it facilitates the internalisation of cross-country spill-overs, thus allowing for more efficient outcomes.