corporations by industry, quarterly, business fixed investment for all industries has been increasing since the october - december quarter last year. more specifically, while the year - bis central bankers ’ speeches on - year rate of change in business fixed investment in manufacturing declined by 0. 6 percent for the april - june quarter this year, the extent of the decline narrowed. by contrast, that in nonmanufacturing registered a large increase – 4. 7 percent – for the same quarter, buoyed by an increase in household spending ( chart 12 ). the relationship between cash flow and business fixed investment also shows that the latter is likely to follow an uptrend going forward ( chart 13 ). changes in industrial structure and entities undertaking business investment having said all this, it is likely that business fixed investment for large manufacturing firms will not increase at a pace as fast as those registered during the previous economic recovery phase in the early 2000s. the recovery after the 1990s was driven by public investment and / or by the export - led manufacturing sector. on the contrary, economic recovery this time is mainly led by the domestic demand - driven nonmanufacturing sector. this suggests that japan ’ s industrial structure, like those of other large economies, is gradually changing and tertiary industrialization is in progress ( chart 14 ). in consideration of this point, there is a possibility that the major bearer of business fixed investment will gradually shift from the manufacturing sector to the nonmanufacturing sector in the future. from the perspective of improving the extent of productivity enhancement through business investment, deregulation will become vital in the nonmanufacturing sector, in particular business sectors such as medical and nursing care, as well as agriculture, which is currently going through the sixth industrialization. in addition, it is important to facilitate infrastructure in the metropolitan areas for the tertiary industry to flourish. urban revitalization provides important underpinnings to start up new leading businesses. it will become an important issue to liberalize the floor - space ratio regulation as well as land - use regulation as part of a growth strategy. should this kind of growth strategy be adopted, it could further reinforce the effects of the qqe. this does not mean, however, that the price stability target of 2 % cannot be achieved without the growth strategy, as the bank is equipped with powerful means to achieve the target. what i wanted to say here is that, if the growth strategy becomes successful, we can achieve a higher real growth rate

without a subject in charge of managing the system. in this context, reference is often made to the so - called permissionless dlts. a different view holds that dlts can improve the efficiency of financial market infrastructure, reduce the time needed for reconciliation and back - office activities, offer high performance and programmability thanks to the use of so - called ‘ smart contracts ’. in this case the emphasis is not on the dlt governance but rather on the benefits that can stem from the technology, independently of whether or not a financial intermediary is in charge of it. let me express some scepticism about the former view. one way or another, counterparty risk would find its way into a fully decentralized large scale trading and settlement system. 7 this is because these systems, to be scaled up, need in practice some centralized infrastructure ( e. g. exchanges ) to provide various services ( e. g. storage of tokens and cryptographic keys, trade, conversion into other tokens or hard currency, … ). in other words, defi, beyond a certain operational scale, is forced to reintroduce the infrastructure that it was supposed to eliminate. and several episodes have shown that this infrastructure is prone to various risks ( cyber and fraud risk in communication by banca d ’ italia on decentralized technology in finance and crypto - assets, rome, june 2022. see e. g. the insightful discussion by f. schar, “ decentralized finance : on blockchain - and smart contract - based financial markets ”, federal reserve bank of st. louis review, second quarter 2021, 153 - 174. particular ), just like the traditional one. once this is acknowledged, defi schemes lose most of their appeal. 8 the second view cannot be easily dismissed. it is undisputable that dlts have useful features. 9 market participants are showing high interest in the topic : last december the bank of italy ( through our milano hub, the innovation centre created to support the digital evolution of italian financial system ) launched a specific call for proposals on dlt applications in finance, insurance and payments. we received 57 projects, submitted by 82 participants. we are currently evaluating them. while the majority of projects comes from italian entities, a non - negligible share comes from other european countries and southeast asia. 10 so the issue becomes an empirical one : is large scale dlt adoption in financial market infrastructure feasible? if