##asuries. some believe that preventing contagion from greece also requires a clear statement from governments that bond holders of other countries will not suffer haircuts or debt write - downs? the heads of state or government have said very clearly that greece is a special case and that, as i just quoted, as regards all other countries they reaffirm their inflexible determination to honour fully their own individual sovereign signature. i would say it was important to avoid any ambiguity in this respect. can you explain how you would leverage the efsf? there are various means to do that and i don ’ t want to embark into technicalities because it ’ s really the responsibility of the treasuries. but there are several ways to leverage the efsf. bis central bankers ’ speeches do you think the ecb ’ s role in providing unlimited liquidity prevented an intensification of the global financial crisis and a depression in europe? i think the governing council of the ecb has demonstrated a capacity to be lucid in diagnosing the gravity of the situation since the start of the crisis in august 2007. so i would certainly echo what you say. we have had two categories of monetary policy measures in this crisis. one has been the decisions on interest rates – what i would call the standard measures – which are designed to deliver price stability over the medium term and be sure that inflation expectations are solidly anchored. on the other hand, in periods of abnormal tensions in financial markets, we have helped restored a better transmission of our monetary policy – of our interest rates – by other, nonstandard measures. the most important of our non - standard measures is full allotment at fixed rates, which we used as early as august 2007 and which is now a generalised concept. other non - standard measures have included intervention in the covered bond market and in treasuries. after almost 13 years of the euro we have delivered for 332 million fellow citizens 2. 0 per cent average annual inflation. this is better than over the past 50 years for the main euro area countries, and we can see from information we extract from financial markets that we are credible to deliver price stability for the next 10 years, in line with our definition. so this is a level of credibility, after four years of crisis, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our so - called separation principle between the standard measures and the non - standard measures. as it is obvious, the euro as a currency is

be very long. the internet revolution of the 1990s was based on scientific investments made in the 1970s and 1980s. and today ’ s widespread commercialization of biotechnology was based, in part, on key research findings developed in the 1950s. thus, governments that choose to provide support for r & d are likely to get better results if that support is stable, avoiding a pattern of feast or famine. 19 government support for r & d presumes sufficient national capacity to engage in effective research at the desired scale. that capacity, in turn, depends importantly on the supply of qualified scientists, engineers, and other technical workers. although the system of higher education in the united states remains among the finest in the world, numerous concerns have been raised about this country ’ s ability to ensure adequate supplies of highly skilled workers. for example, some observers have suggested that bottlenecks in the system limit the number of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science and engineering : surveys of student intentions in the united states consistently show that the number of students who seek to major in science and engineering exceeds the number accommodated by a wide margin, and waitlists to enroll in technical courses have trended up relative to those in other fields, as has the time required to graduate with a science and engineering degree. 20 moreover, although the relative wages of science and engineering graduates have increased significantly over the past few decades, the share of undergraduate degrees awarded in science and engineering has been roughly stable. 21 at the same time, critics of see lane ( 2009 ). for early work in this area, see nelson ( 1959, 1961 ). see greenstein ( 2007 ), huang and murray ( 2010 ), and freeman and van reenen ( 2009 ). see freeman and van reenen ( 2009 ). for a discussion of why these bottlenecks persist, see romer ( 2000 ) and noll ( 2003 ). see national science board ( 2010 ), tables 2 – 6 and 2 – 12. bis central bankers ’ speeches k – 12 education in the united states have long argued that not enough is being done to encourage and support student interest in science and mathematics. taken together, these trends suggest that more could be done to increase the number of u. s. students entering scientific and engineering professions. at least when viewed from the perspective of a single nation, immigration is another path for increasing the supply of highly skilled scientists and researchers. the technological leadership of the united states was and continues to be built in substantial part on the