creative potential to expand. human capital or, in other words, highly skilled experts since time immemorial, highly - qualified workers with specialist skills have been creating new business opportunities using financial products and innovations. examples of this are in no short supply : in the early middle ages, for instance, business with trade bills in italy, and then later government bonds underwriting as a specialty in the financial centre of frankfurt. around the turn of the millennium, it was financial engineering using securitisation techniques in the anglo - saxon world. at the same time, a financial centre has to be attractive enough to lure highly qualified staff. quality of life is not always clearly measureable, yet it does play an important role when choosing a place to work. infrastructure in the middle ages, it was a favourable location along the trade routes that determined where the financial centres would blossom. this was later facilitated by having a good road, rail and air traffic network. nowadays, the digital infrastructure is playing an increasingly decisive role. speed in information processing has become a success factor. for financial enterprises which are increasingly focusing on automated trading systems, fast data connections to stock exchanges are essential. the european union and the euro area are doing well in embodying many of these features, namely openness and economic strength, political and legal stability and human capital and infrastructure. we live in strong, diversified economic areas with high living standards and a broad cultural landscape. we have the euro, whose stability is guarded by the bundesbank and the other eurosystem central banks, and which enjoys the confidence of investors around the world. we do business in a single market with a largely harmonised regulatory framework. people, goods, services and capital can move freely and quickly in the second strongest economic area of the world. the banking union with its single supervisory mechanism and harmonised regulation has further strengthened trust in the european financial system. and the emerging capital markets union is moving european financial integration further forward. competition among financial centres remains lively, however. this prompts me to take a look at one of the features i mentioned earlier and which, in my opinion, merits special attention from politicians and financial market participants alike : digital infrastructure. economic history has demonstrated that changes to infrastructure can have a considerable impact. the decline of venice as a trading and financial centre was sealed when the sea route to india was discovered at the turn of the 15th / 16th centuries. the new sea route was much more advantageous than the journey by land,

facilitates more efficient evaluation work in the official sector ( including international organizations ), for academic researchers, and the industry. repositories are well - established in some fields such as medicine, where the cochrane library or the mcmaster health forum20 provide structured evidence on medical research, also by compiling meta - studies. similarly, in the field of development economics, the international initiative for impact evaluation ( 3ie ) collects information on the effects of policies and programs in development economics. the j - pal initiative does the same in the case of poverty - reduction projects. the oecd ’ s international network on financial education ( infe ) 21 is a platform that facilitates the exchange of experiences on policies promoting financial education. it does so by collecting data and developing comparative reports. finally, the bank for international settlements ( bis ) recently launched a “ financial regulation assessment : meta exercise ( frame ) ”, which enhances the transparency of existing studies and improves efficiency in terms of collecting relevant information. 22 4 infrastructures supporting good evaluations many projects and initiatives show that policymaking can benefit from sound evaluations and from making the best use of available knowledge. evidence - based policy can help improve and continue successful policies, while finding negative or unintended consequences can point to areas for improvement. but evidence - based policy comes at a price. rigorous evaluations take time, and they require input of human resources and data. not least, evaluations require good communication on how to interpret findings and how to put them into perspective. these costs of evaluations can be reduced by setting up the right infrastructures : legal mandates and administrative procedures : there will be a natural tendency of policy evaluations to be in a time and resource conflict with other administrative tasks. moreover, unless clear procedures for evaluations have been established, political considerations may dominate the administrative agenda. against this background, establishing and strengthening legal mandates for mandatory evaluations can overcome political biases and the tendency toward inaction. clear legal mandates can help to identify and agree on policy objectives, indicators, and benchmarks upfront. and they help to embed procedures for policy evaluations into mandates and day - to - day work of administrations, thus helping to avoid conflicts with other tasks. repositories and information platforms : generating, using, and adapting evaluation projects will happen more easily if relevant information is readily available. one way to facilitate the flow and exchange of information are repositories of evaluation studies. in addition, an important prerequisite