samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
The most striking symptom of this is the recruitment difficulties reported by 52% of companiesix , with around 300,000 unfilled jobsx, even though France still counts 2.4 million unemployed, xi including 600,000 young people. This is an economically unacceptable paradox, but even more so socially. Page 9 sur 15  There is no greater priority than to get out of this French impasse, and in order to do so, to understand the problem by comparing our situation with that of Germany, which is at full employment (with an unemployment rate of 3.4%xii). While hourly productivity is similar, the average number of hours worked per capita is 10% higher in Germany. This difference is largely due to our low employment rate. While in the mid-2000s, our employment rate stood at 63%, which was roughly identical to the German rate (64%)xiii, it is now clearly lagging behind even though it has started rising (67% compared to 75%).xiv This gap is partly due to the more widespread use of part-time work and work-study schemes in Germany. Nevertheless, for a working-age population of just over 40 million people, this gap represents a shortfall of close to 3 million jobs, which mainly concerns young people (1.2 million missing jobs) and seniors (1.3 million). So let's first talk about young people, then seniors, and then about the measures for all working people. Page 10 sur 15 For the past decade, the share of young people who are not in employment, education or training (the so-called NEETs) has remained stable overall.

Each of our monthly surveys confirms this, including that of the beginning of January: GDP has returned to its pre-Covid level since last August, earlier than expected and earlier than our European neighbours; the fifth health wave should not prevent significant growth in 2022, i.e. 3.6% in our forecast. The French economy should therefore return to its previous growth pathi by 2023 and Covid should leave few scars on the French economic fabric. Overall, the Covid crisis has been well managed economically by the public authorities. These very successes justify firmly resisting today a return to "whatever it takes": entrepreneurs are not meant to be subsidised for life. Page 3 sur 15 b) Due to this recovery in particular, companies are undoubtedly experiencing supply difficulties. They have little impact on the volume of activity (excluding the automotive sector), but push up prices, including those of manufactured goods. At 3.4% year-on-year at the end of 2021 (2.1% excluding energy and food), inflation in France is at its highest level since September 2008. This "hump" is bigger and longer than expected, but it should remain temporary: inflation in France should gradually decrease throughout the year, falling back below 2% by the end of 2022. This is a high-quality forecast; it is obviously not a dead certainty. We are keeping a very close watch on the economic data. Should inflation prove to be more persistent, rest assured that we will be willing and able to adjust our monetary policy more quickly, to ensure a return to our 2% objective.
The various parts of the economy are connected, which often means that a strengthening of the weaker parts is even more important to the economy as a whole than to the effects on a particular branch or sector. It is exactly this – the complementarity of the 4 economy – which makes it particularly important to deal with our weak links and to listen with humility to the proposals of the OECD and IMF, for instance. It is often easier to identify problems if one can see things with a little perspective. I believe that the Swedish economy has considerable unutilised potential for a strong growth if we concentrate on it, if we all work together to make our joint cake grow. 4  The significance of a complementarity in economic policy has been demonstrated by, for instance, Aziz and Wescott 1997 in "Policy Complementarities and the Washington Consensus". 4  BIS Review 78/2001

Yet citizens can be certain that three elements will remain constant. The ECB will do what is necessary to ensure price stability. It will remain independent. And it will always act within the limits of its mandate. Yet it should be understood that fulfilling our mandate sometimes requires us to go beyond standard monetary policy tools. When markets are fragmented or influenced by irrational fears, our monetary policy signals do not reach citizens evenly across the euro area. We have to fix such blockages to ensure a single monetary policy and therefore price stability for all euro area citizens. This may at times require exceptional measures. But this is our responsibility as the central bank of the euro area as a whole. The ECB is not a political institution. But it is committed to its responsibilities as an institution of the European Union. As such, we never lose sight of our mission to guarantee a strong and stable currency. The banknotes that we issue bear the European flag and are a powerful symbol of European identity. Those who want to go back to the past misunderstand the significance of the euro. Those who claim only a full federation can be sustainable set the bar too high. What we need is a gradual and structured effort to complete EMU. This would finally give the euro the stable foundations it deserves. It would fully achieve the ultimate goals for which the Union and the euro were founded: stability, prosperity and peace.
Notably, it is true that as the unemployment rate has come down, the pace of wage gains has increased. But what is different in the current environment is that productivity growth has increased roughly in tandem with the rate of compensation growth, thereby negating the inflationary impulses of these wage gains. Thus, probably the most notable feature of the remarkable expansion in the US economy over this past decade has been a rebound in the growth rate of productivity. Whereas the productivity growth rate had languished at the 1½% level throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, it rose steadily over the decade of the 1990s, reaching an astonishing 5.7% annual growth rate in the second half of 1999. The question that remains unanswered - and troublesome - is whether this significant improvement in productivity growth, which has made the US economy one of the most competitive in the world today, is temporary or permanent. What is less often taken into account is that the US productivity boom of the 1990s has taken place against a background of very low inflation in the United States and rapidly decelerating inflation in almost every region of the world. Through much of the 1990s, weak economic performance elsewhere in the world has held down commodity price inflation and strengthened the dollar.

The Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) estimated that assets of the global Islamic financial services industry grew by 20.4% year-on-year to reach an estimated USD1.6 trillion as at end 2012.1 Last year also saw a record volume of sukuk issuances globally, with sukuk issuance from more countries, and of larger size and longer tenor. Key financial centres have continued to facilitate the development of Islamic finance within their jurisdictions. Singapore has made adjustments to our regulatory and tax regime to allow for the growth of Islamic finance since 2004. Hong Kong has recently amended its tax regulations to allow for issuance of sukuk, while the UK recently established an industry task force to facilitate further development of Islamic finance. Going forward, the broadening and deepening of economic and financial ties between Asia and the Middle East, the two major centres for Islamic finance, will also provide further impetus for future growth of Islamic finance globally. Connectivity between Asia and the Middle East There are three important observations to be made on the growing connectivity between Asia and the Middle East. First, the economic relationship between the two regions has expanded beyond the energyrelated sector. Asia’s demand for energy exports from the Middle East will continue to remain robust as the region expands. However, non-energy trade between the two regions is also growing fast. About 40% of GCC’s non-oil exports are to Asia. Saudi Arabia is the leading  1  Islamic Financial Services Industry Stability Report 2013, Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB).
Importantly, Chetty finds even more significant variation in intergenerational mobility across different metro and rural areas within the United States.4 While some regions in the U.S. match the highest mobility levels among developed countries, others persistently offer less mobility than in most other developed countries. Relative income mobility is highest in the Mountain West and the rural Midwest and lowest in the Southeast. Now these differences could be caused by the experience of living in different neighborhoods, but they may also simply reflect differences in the people living in these neighborhoods. In an effort to distinguish between these two possible explanations, Chetty and fellow economists study children from families who changed their neighborhood during childhood and provide evidence that much of the variation in upward mobility reflects the experience of living in particular neighborhoods. Their findings imply that upward mobility depends strongly on where you grow up as a child. This research indicates that it is the places themselves, rather than the families who live there, that affect the outcomes for children. An important question is what specific features of neighborhoods are associated with greater upward mobility. Chetty and co-authors find that higher upward mobility is associated with areas that are less residentially segregated by race or income, have lower income inequality (i.e. a bigger middle class), higher quality schools,5 stronger social networks, higher community involvement and stable family structures. The finding that intergenerational mobility is primarily a local problem has two broad policy implications.

It is a foundational element for a well-functioning democratic society and provides evidence about the ability of an economy to provide opportunities for its citizens. A standard approach to measuring income mobility is to compare where a child is in the income distribution relative to where the parents were in the income distribution. A striking result is that intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. – a child’s chances of moving up in the income distribution relative to her parents – has remained stable over the past half century. However, because of the increase in income inequality, the consequences of being born to low-versus high-income parents are larger today than in the past. One explanation for the lack of a correlation between income inequality and income mobility in the U.S. is that income inequality is strongly influenced by the top one percent of the income distribution, but there is little correlation between income mobility and this top income percentile.2 While income mobility in the United States has been relatively unchanged, it remains well below several other nations. According to Stanford economist Raj Chetty, the probability of moving from the bottom quintile to the top quintile is 7.5 percent in the United States, as compared to 11.7 percent in Denmark and 13.5 percent in Canada – two countries with relatively high levels of intergenerational mobility.3 So effectively the chance of achieving the American Dream is not the highest for children born in America.
The measures included in this plan would have a positive impact of 0.2 pp on the average GDP growth rate. situation, use of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) funds and financing conditions that, while somewhat tighter than in previous quarters, remain favourable. Turning to the inflation forecasts, in step with the paths of the corresponding futures markets, the upward pressures of the energy component are expected to peak in the second quarter of 2022 and then decelerate. The inflation projections rest on two assumptions: (i) that, in line with the information from the EBAE, the pass-through of higher intermediate costs to final prices will only be relatively moderate (albeit more forceful than envisaged in the December projection exercise); and (ii) that the second-round effects will be limited, i.e. scant feedback effects between inflationary pressures on prices and wages. Inflationary pressures will be partly alleviated by the measures contained in the National Plan to respond to the economic and social consequences of the war in Ukraine.4 Furthermore, these projections do not yet include the possible changes in prices on the electricity market that are currently being negotiated in the European Union. Against this backdrop, the projections see inflation standing at 7.5% in 2022. It will then fall in 2023 to around 2%, thanks, above all, to the moderation of the energy component. Underlying inflation will not start to decline until end-2022, once the upward pressures on firms’ costs associated with energy prices and bottlenecks have corrected.

With low unemployment, solid wage growth, and ample job openings, all indicators show that the strength of the labor market is at a level consistent with my view of maximum employment. Inflationary Pressures The other side of our mandate is price stability, and this is where our greatest challenge now lies. Inflation is far too high. In February, inflation-as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index-was nearly 6½ percent. And high inflation is a key concern in many countries around the world. Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the rapid global economic rebound had driven up prices for oil and many other commodities. Higher inflation is especially detrimental for those who are least able to meet the growing cost of essentials like food, housing, and transportation. The war in Ukraine and the global response present even greater challenges and uncertainty. For example, Russia and Ukraine are large exporters of key materials, including neon, palladium, and platinum. Those materials are used in the production of a wide array of products, from auto parts to computer chips. Even before the war,  2/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  manufacturers were confronting shortages of important inputs. Further disruptions to these key products could create spillovers to economies across the globe. But there are differences in the ways in which countries are experiencing inflation. In the United States, we are now seeing elevated inflation across many categories of goods and services.
In the euro countries, the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact provide guidelines for fiscal policy, including requirements to reduce government debt and to record a budget surplus during upturns and the establishment of limits on deficits during recessions. Sweden has placed a cap on government expenditure in the medium term, and is systematically reducing government debt. The UK is complying with a guideline stating that public consumption should not be debt-financed. They have also placed a cap on government net debt. The US has created a significant budget surplus, and government debt is being reduced. In Norway it is important that the annual budgets are anchored in a long-term strategy which takes into account that oil revenues may fluctuate from one year to the next. It is an advantage if fiscal policy can also be used to counter fluctuations in demand and production. Given the policy objective, the government budget should not have a procyclical effect. It would be undesirable for government budgets to contribute to increased demand for labour at times when price and wage inflation is appreciably higher than the rate in other countries. Transparency in monetary policy In order to contribute to greater credibility and confidence, Norges Bank places emphasis on transparency with regard to its interest rate policy. Transparency promotes predictability in the behaviour of the central bank and helps reduce uncertainty for economic agents.

Following the next decision to increase interest rates by 0.25 percentage point on 20 September, we indicated that the probability that the next change in interest rates would be a reduction was the same as the probability of an increase. The sight deposit rate has since remained at 7.00 per cent. In the December 2000 Inflation Report, it was estimated that price inflation would decline gradually in the years ahead, but remain higher than 2 per cent in 2003 and 2004. However, the projections were based on the assumption that interest rates move in line with market expectations, as implied by the forward rate curve. The market had factored in a decline in interest rates over the next two years. It thus appeared that market participants had a different perception of the probability of a reduction in interest rates than the one expressed by Norges Bank. The technical assumption of a fall in interest rates influenced the projections. In the report, we also indicated that given an unchanged interest rate, projected price inflation would be below 2 per cent from the end of 2002. Has monetary policy been successful? It is not possible to find a simple performance measure that makes it easy to determine in retrospect whether monetary policy has been successful. As noted earlier, confidence and credibility are important for achieving the objectives of monetary policy. The degree of confidence and credibility will be an indication of how successful monetary policy has been. Confidence and credibility cannot be measured directly.
The results of our decisions can be measured. Hence the government authorities can evaluate our performance. The interest rate differential against other countries has widened  Central banks in several countries have reduced interest rates earlier this year with a view to countering an economic turnaround. The Federal Reserve has cut the federal funds target rate by a total of 2½ percentage points since the beginning of the year. The Bank of England and the European Central Bank have recently cut rates. There is a also a tendency towards a more expansionary fiscal stance in many countries. In the US, fiscal policy has become somewhat more expansionary after many years of relatively tight budgets. Many European countries have also taken a pause in the consolidation of state finances. Norges Bank increased the sight deposit rate – which is our key rate – by a total of 1½ percentage points last year. So far this year, the key rate has remained unchanged. As a result, the difference between short-term rates in Norway and other countries has increased. Money market rates are about 3 percentage points higher than among our trading partners. Money market rates are 3½ percentage points lower in Sweden than in Norway. The wider interest rate differential implies, in isolation, a somewhat tighter monetary policy. The krone becomes a more attractive investment currency, and this may have contributed to strengthening the krone. Investments in the NOK market are now generating a return of 7 per cent.

Measuring productivity in service industries is difficult. The chart shows that according to the national accounts, productivity growth is very volatile. If we smooth the data somewhat, it appears, however, that productivity growth has been relatively high through the 1990s, following low growth at the end of the 1980s. At the very end of the 1990s, however, productivity growth was weak. 10  BIS Review 47/2001  One source that may be used to analyse developments in distributive trades is Norges Bank’s database Sebra which contains figures for all limited companies that have turned in valid accounts to the Brønnøysund Register. The figures, from 1988 to 1999, show that profitability in this industry has been positive since 1993. Both measures of profitability show a slightly falling trend from the peak year 1994 to 1998. In 1999, it appears that profitability improved again. The increase in profitability from the end of the 1980s to the mid-1990s reflects a structural development in the industry since the 1980s. The most important changes were the emergence of chains and the development of shopping centres. When the upturn came in the mid-1990s, a better structure was in place. Both the chains and the shopping centres have increased their market shares. This structural development has probably made it possible to maintain satisfactory profitability at the 2 same time that profit margins have declined. Operations became more efficient. Profitability has been satisfactory despite lower mark-ups on the cost of goods. In 1998 and 1999, however, profit margins increased somewhat.
In this connection, we also believe that it is crucial that banks should review and revamp their incentive systems so as to avoid rewarding staff on the basis of sales volume and commission earned, which would  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  nurture a tendency to push financial products to customers to meet business targets without giving sufficient regard to the interests of the customers. This change in the incentive system to reduce mis-selling is taking place in the more advanced markets, and Hong Kong must not lag behind if we wish to continue to pride ourselves as one of the leading international financial centres. In terms of helping the customers to become smarter and more responsible, we need to enhance the financial literacy of our citizens. Surely there is plenty of scope to include financial literacy education in our school and university curriculum. In addition, the HKMA, in collaboration with key stakeholders such as the Consumer Council as well as the Investor Education Centre set up by the SFC, is going to launch a new public education programme that seeks to help bank customers become “Smart and Responsible”. The first of a series of programmes will be rolled out in the next few months. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure all of you are frequent users of banking services.

This can be achieved through strategic partnerships with training providers, actively contributing towards industry-wide efforts to support the training agenda and continuous improvements to internal learning programmes. This is also the option that is by far more challenging, but ultimately the one that provides the optimal payoff for individual institutions, for our financial sector, and the economy. The magnitude of the task, however, demands our collective efforts to secure a sustainable pool of talent that will serve both the present as well as future needs of the industry. The industry also needs to participate in the formal learning programmes by the institutions of higher learning. It is encouraging to note that several have volunteered following the recent dialogue earlier this year organised by Bank Negara Malaysia and the Ministry of Higher Education . By contributing towards positive reforms in the academic curriculum and providing other forms of practical support, the industry is making an important investment in its own future. To take this effort further forward, Bank Negara Malaysia is initiating an extensive programme to train and prepare at least 1,000 deserving graduates for immediate placements in banking and insurance institutions. This effort will be undertaken in collaboration with the industry and training institutes and is aimed at boosting the supply of well-trained and competent personnel for the financial services industry. The selection process will be rigorous, and the training programme will be designed to produce first grade candidates for employment at the management trainee level.