up to 8 %, according to the bank of england. this would naturally affect the euro area economy. i hope we will avoid such a scenario. do the tensions over the populist italian government ’ s budget risk sparking a new crisis in the euro area? following the agreement in december between the italian government and the european commission on the italian budget, the country ’ s borrowing costs fell. this confirms that, when a country follows the common rules, its efforts go down well with the markets. italy ’ s main challenge at the moment is its weak growth ; this has been the case for several years now. rome must urgently implement structural reforms in order to increase its growth potential 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches by resolving its productivity issues, regaining competitiveness and targeting internal weaknesses. how much have the political uncertainties already cost the euro area in terms of growth? it is very hard to measure this precisely, as it is very difficult to incorporate certain variables, like confidence and business sentiment, into macroeconomic models. nonetheless, for the past six to nine months protectionism has been the main risk at the international level, and one of the major sources of market volatility. it is essential that the united states and china, as well as the eu, find common ground so that these tensions don ’ t devolve into a trade war that would be harmful to everyone. why is inflation still struggling to recover in the euro area? the situation in the job market has improved considerably in the euro area. nine million jobs have been created since the crisis and the unemployment rate has fallen below 8 %. compensation per employee is also recovering. what matters is knowing when this increase will translate into a pickup in underlying inflation, which excludes the most volatile product prices, like energy prices. we are confident that it will pick up within a few months or quarters. even if energy prices were to fall a little in the coming months, we are confident that inflation will, over the medium term, converge towards our aim of below, but close to, 2 %. for several months now, political leaders ’ criticisms of central bank independence have been growing, in europe and, above all, in the united states. does that worry you? in recent decades, the independence of central banks has proven extremely effective in maintaining price stability. political and economic agendas are very different. when monetary institutions act under the influence of political leaders, they run the risk of making serious mistakes that harm economic activity.

, i still think, very much wrong with it. firstly it is not very user - friendly. the format is amateurish and there are no “ search ” and “ help aid ” for users. so we hired outside webpage experts to upgrade it, who have been working for the last year, and will be ready to go forward with our easy - to - read, easy - to - use, user - friendly format in the next couple of months. the information available on our webpage, whilst extensive does not go back very far in history, and to do real economic analysis, you may have to contact with the team responsible for these issues. though this is easily done automatically by just clicking into the information item, it is still much better to have the information readily available on the internet rather than having to contact people. in the more major task of restructuring the organisation, the work system and the vision of the bank of thailand which we have been doing in the past two years, we have established a new department called the data warehouse department. this department will store all the information of the bank, sourcing the raw information totally by edi, thereby dispensing with the more than 900 paper reports that the financial institutions are having to fill every month and make the information available to every user inside the bank of thailand and outside the bank according as to their needs and access clearance. upon completion of the data warehouse, we have a plan to make economic information available on our webpage over a 20 - year historical time - span, and this will be done in the next two years. another user - aid which we have done, but have not had the time nor resource available to make it really effective, is having a separate english and thai language webpage. we have instituted this dual webpage, but unfortunately the english translation is quite frequently not available. we will try to have more of an equivalence between the two services. but the english language, not being the language of choice in thailand, we expect that the word “ available only in thai text ” is going to reign supreme for a very extensive part of the alphanumeric system. a webpage might seem only a small matter to bring up for this speech, but actually an organisation ’ s webpage signals its attitude towards advance technology and its intent to be transparent, so it is an important item and is useful to look at for a quick checking into the attitude of people you don ’ t know well. more importantly the central