, bank accounts, credit intermediaries ). one of the legislative initiatives that requires special attention is the proposal for a directive on payment services. the proposed directive, which is part of the wider single european payments area project, aims to establish a modern and harmonised legal and operational framework necessary for the creation of an integrated retail payments market, which would enable payments to be made more quickly and easily throughout the eu. the proposal also aims to introduce more competition in payment systems and facilitate the realisation of economies of scale. this will improve efficiency and reduce the cost of payment systems for the economy as a whole, an issue of high importance to the bank of greece, as electronic payments systems are not very much in demand in greece. future challenges supervisory architecture within the eu lately, several discussions have revolved around the issue of the eu supervisory architecture, one of the arguments being that the complexity of supervisory arrangements increases in parallel with the growth of a banking group's cross - border activity. without dismissing these concerns, we do not share the view that the conduct of cross - border activities is connected with a significant supervisory burden. on the contrary, the most important obstacles to the expansion of cross - border activity in the banking sector are the differences in the tax treatment of banking products among different states, cultural differences and the lack of proximity ( except in the case of branches ). different views on the supervisory architecture advocate alternative models of supervision, ranging from complete centralisation to total decentralisation. each approach has its own merits, but also raises a number of complicated strategic and operational issues that need to be addressed. i believe that in no way should extreme solutions be adopted and instead implement the lamfalussy approach, which though is not a panacea, has the definite advantage of allowing for a lot of flexibility. first of all, it provides for a range of different degrees of centralisation in the regulatory process, which would entail a more or less harmonised set of rules depending on the issues that need to be addressed. in this way, it facilitates the swift adaptation of community legislation to new developments in the financial markets, which in many cases have cross - sectoral dimensions. moreover, it boosts regulatory and supervisory convergence while at the same time allowing for the efficient handling of differences arising from the fact that the vast majority of the 8, 000 credit institutions in the eu operate domestically and sometimes even locally, in markets with diverse characteristics and which can better be assessed by local supervisors, as the

studies have suggested that import competition from low - wage countries has depressed wages for low - skilled workers relative to those for higher - skilled workers in recent decades. however, other studies have argued that the rise in skill premiums is attributable to technological developments that have raised relative demands for educated workers. focusing on the past few years, we see no consensus on how the mix of low - and high - wage jobs in the economy has evolved ; estimates are extremely sensitive to the definition of job classes, the source of data, the time period, and method of calculation. in any event, it is doubtful that changes in the pattern of wages in the u. s. economy can be explained by any single factor - trends in trade, in population and immigration, in unionization and labor market competition, in minimum wage policy, in the skill mix of the labor force, and in technology all play a role. drawbacks of protectionism to sum up the discussion so far, the public likely has a reasonably good grasp of the benefits of free trade. it is the perceived drawbacks to international trade that probably account for the ambivalence indicated in opinion surveys. some of these fears may be overstated - for example, the claim that imports lower aggregate employment. but other concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand - especially the claim that trade leads to disruptions for some workers. balancing the pain for a few against the this is based on widely cited results from the technology research firm forrester, which predicts that 3. 4 million u. s. service jobs will have been moved offshore by 2015. martin neil baily and robert z, lawrence ( 2004 ), “ what happened to the great u. s. job machine? the role of trade and offshoring, ” paper prepared for the brookings panel on economic activity, september 9 - 10. their rough estimate of nearly 45, 000 software jobs relocated annually to india is consistent with an estimate by charles l. shultze that “ the number of workers employed in producing computer and related services relocated from the united states to india could have increased by roughly 185, 000 over the past four years ” ( charles l. schultze, “ offshoring, import competition, and the jobless recovery, ” policy brief 136, washington : the brookings institution, august ). lasting gains for the economy as a whole, economists generally view the latter as outweighing the former, but it is admittedly difficult for many individuals