Stepping up investment in capital goods and establishing conditions conducive to the incorporation of technological progress, especially in the ICT field, are vital factors for boosting productivity gains in the economy. Nevertheless, as the experience of other countries (particularly the United States) has shown, to reap the potential benefits of the incorporation of new technologies through investment also requires setting a more flexibly working economy in place, pushing through structural and liberalising reforms, and designing an appropriate regulatory framework. Structural reforms aimed at promoting flexibility, innovation, human capital formation and competitiveness should not be considered as having only medium- and long-term effects. The recent history of the Spanish economy illustrates the relative speed with which their effects have become visible, when they have been applied with perseverance and consistency. This is because they alter the expectations of agents, who incorporate the new framework into their behaviour almost immediately. The foregoing takes on special importance in the face of the challenges EU enlargement entails. The similarities between the productive specialisation of our economy and that of the accession countries, combined with their low-cost and highly trained labour, pose a challenge to the Spanish economy, which has to face stiff competition in those industries in which Spain is more specialised. It will be necessary to bolster the competitive capacity of the Spanish productive structure through productdifferentiation and quality-enhancing strategies, by improving its endowment of technological and human capital and by developing the technologically most advanced industries.

Exceptional circumstances still apply for monetary policy Clearly, exceptional circumstances still apply for monetary policy. This is the case not only for Switzerland and the euro area, but also for the US, Japan and the UK. As you know, the ECB reduced its refinancing rate by a further 25 basis points two weeks ago. In the US and Japan, current quantitative easing measures are giving rise to a further expansion in central bank balance sheets. The fact that monetary policy in the advanced economies is likely to remain exceptionally expansionary for some time to come can be seen in market expectations for reference rates (cf. chart 3). At the moment, the markets are assuming that the Federal Reserve will increase its key interest rate in the second quarter of 2015, the ECB in the fourth quarter of 2015 and the SNB in the first quarter of 2016. Last year, a number of central banks introduced the principle of forward guidance, in order to further increase the effectiveness of their expansionary monetary policy. Forward guidance involves the provision of information on the expected movement of short-term interest rates. To some extent, information of this kind has already been provided by central banks in the past. What is new with forward guidance is that some central banks give an explicit indication of how long they expect low interest rates to continue. For instance, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have tied the assessment of their respective reference rates to a threshold for the unemployment rate.