At the same time, while anti-crisis budget measures were particularly important during the period of restrictions and will be curtailed in future, accommodative monetary policy will continue to operate next year to support the Russian economy. I would also like to emphasise that both fiscal and monetary policies play a countercyclical role, that is, they address the issue of overcoming the downturn and bringing the economy back to its potential. This is certainly a top-priority task in the current situation, yet it is critical to remember what is absolutely essential for sustainable long-term development and an increase in economic potential, labour productivity and, accordingly, households’ incomes. To tackle this task, we need incentives to increase private investments and develop private initiatives and should enhance the flexibility of the labour market, which primarily depends on the business climate and other structural factors. The level of our economic potential after the pandemic and how quickly the economy will regain it are crucial for both our macroeconomic forecast and monetary policy. As you know, this uncertainty of supply- and demand-side factors is a key point in our forecast scenarios. They are presented in the draft Monetary Policy Guidelines for 2021– 2023 published last week. We are going to update our forecast estimates following the Board of Directors’ meeting scheduled for October. Yet, our approaches to the set of scenarios and key forecast assumptions in the scenarios will remain unchanged. Winding up, I would like to make my traditional comments on monetary policy prospects.

It is worth noting that the Board of the Central Bank of Chile believes that the risk of an even weaker performance of the world economy is still latent and is more likely to occur than is a more optimistic scenario. A lasting recuperation of the developed world calls for a reduction in the current-account deficits accumulated before the crisis. Some advanced economies like the U.S. must reduce their trade imbalances, but their possibility of basing growth on their external sectors is limited. In the Eurozone, the rigidities associated to the common currency slow the exchange rate adjustment inside the region. In China, high savings and exchange rate interventions lock the parities’ adjustments. At the national level, third-quarter figures for output and demand continued to show strong dynamism, although with some deceleration compared with the first half (figure 5). In that quarter, GDP rose 7% annually, with a velocity of 8.1%. In aggregate, third-quarter output was in line with the baseline scenario we had foreseen in September, but with a different composition both on the output side and on the expenditures side. From the expenditures standpoint, it is worth mentioning the moderation of the durable components of demand – i.e., purchases of durable goods and investment in machinery & equipment – with respect to indicators for the first half. Investment, although at a slower pace than forecast in September, continued to expand during the third quarter, driven by imports of machinery & equipment. Meanwhile, non-durable private consumption outperformed expectations again.