dimitar bogov : addressing structural rigidities in view of monetary policy transmission effectiveness address by mr dimitar bogov, governor of the national bank of the republic of macedonia, at the 4th research conference “ addressing structural rigidities in view of monetary policy transmission effectiveness ”, skopje, 23 april 2015. * * * dear governors, your excellences, ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, it is my pleasure to welcome you all, on our fourth research conference, entitled addressing structural rigidities in view of monetary policy transmission effectiveness. just like the previous years, we hope that the topic of this conference is both interesting and challenging to provide an interactive framework for discussion and research - based policy advices for the central bankers. structural rigidities, indeed, are related to a wide range of economic segments. therefore, today we will try to tackle different economic issues, enlightening their importance for the monetary policy transmission effectiveness. transition economies have undergone many structural changes in the ongoing reshaping of the economies, which to some extent have influenced the monetary policy decision making or monetary policy transmission channels. globalization is yet another factor that tends to produce changes in the economic structure and at the same time, affects the markets functioning or economic agents ’ behavior. the labor market rigidities, wage and price settings, financial market imperfection, impact of foreign direct investments and many other issues must be appropriately taken into consideration in the monetary policy implementation and probably we have all put in a great deal of effort to accommodate our models to capture these specifics. the last global crisis, with its overall severity, time length and countries coverage reactivated the importance of structural issues for the advanced economies too, pointing to the fact that not always same measure fits any situation, not always same risk affects in a same way and not always same threshold is valid for everyone. nowadays, we speak about flexible and innovative monetary policy, designed on a broadly based information platform, incorporating structural features of the economies and all specifics of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. since the onset of the crisis, we have tried to better incorporate financial stability aspects into monetary policy decision making. in addition, we learnt that zero lower bound rate in the advanced economies or historically lowest interest rates in emerging economies were not able to revive credit growth, until we moved towards renovating our toolkit. nonstandard monetary policy measures in different modalities have been widely used by the central banks around the globe during the crisis period, with the ultimate goal to capture countries ’ specific

last year. according to the un study, the decrease was more prominent among women than men ; especially among women in rural areas, and among women 35 – 44 years of age. although wage data is still not available to see how the covid crisis has affected this wage gap that existed even in the pre - crisis period, some indicators point out that probably the wage gap has widened throughout this period. for example, in north macedonia assessment is that the wage gap has hovered throughout the range of 16 – 20 %, which is already large. apparently, the crisis has hit women and men unevenly, which is a natural consequence of the fact that it did not hit all the sectors equally. it had more pronounced effect on the services, especially services dependent on social interaction, and informal economy where women tend to be presented more. for example, in our country these sectors employ about 27 % of all employed women and about 25 % of all employed men. in addition, according to some studies, the makenzie study for instance, point out that pandemics have intensified the challenges that women already face at the workplace – doing double work shifts, being at work, being at home with family responsibilities, and find that 1 in 4 women consider downshifting their careers because of family responsibilities and new covid environment ( interruption in schooling and childcare ). these developments, such as lower employment and lower income, can negatively affect access to finance, to the financial system, especially banking system, as employment and income are one of the main criteria assessing the credit worthiness of the borrowers and can further amplify the risks or the challenges for women. let me mention couple of numbers. for the western balkan region, about 60 % of all borrowers from commercial banks are men and only 40 % are women. and even more, 64 % of all outstanding loans are extended to men. i think this number gives a flavor of the kind of challenges women face across the region. the access to finance is an important determinant, not only for the basic needs, but also for female entrepreneurship that lacks in the region in comparison to more advance economies. overall, all the numbers that were discussed, clearly point that unlike other previous crisis episodes, this one has definitely disproportionately affected women in many respects, additionally accentuating the challenges that women have faced even before the crises. particularly worrisome is the further increase of inactivity of women as the region faces shrinking working age