lending in particular, during the economic boom ) and the relatively large width of the interest rate corridor ( initially warranted by the imperative of cooling off speculative capital inflows and domestic currency appreciation ). the nbr has capitalised, in the past two years, on the window of opportunity provided by the favourable macroeconomic and financial background to rectify the situation to a large extent, yet the process needs to be continued until reaching the prevailing levels across the eu. looking ahead, it is essential that the nbr identify, as it has until now, the right timing for the upcoming stages of the alignment process to unfold bis central bankers ’ speeches without impairing the smooth functioning of the markets and without deteriorating key indicators for investor sentiment or, more generally, public perception. i will end my brief overview on the economic state of play in romania by expressing my hope that this event will turn out to be the beginning of a lucrative and mutually beneficial partnership. bis central bankers ’ speeches

such as the domestic output gap and inflation expectations ). today, inflation is becoming increasingly less local, and in turn, becomes more and more dependent on global factors, i. e. the relationship between global demand to global supply. research that analysed the course of inflation in 22 oecd countries between 1960 and 2003 has shown that 70 % of inflation volatility may be explained by a common factor 7. this global, common factor explains not only the change in the inflation trend ( the increasing inflation between 1960 and 1980 and its subsequent decrease ), but also inflation fluctuation over a business cycle. the research has also shown that, where domestic inflation deviates from the “ global ” inflation, it exhibits a “ global - inflation - reverting ” tendency. as a consequence, modelling and forecasting of domestic inflation may be improved significantly by taking into account the “ global inflation ”. the fast - progressing globalisation is closely related to offshoring and outsourcing, whose scope is also growing. unfortunately there is not much hard data that would allow for assessment of the scale of the phenomenon. offshoring analysis is available only for selected countries and covers only selected industries. however, the growing scale of the phenomenon is reflected by data on global trade in goods and services and on foreign direct investment. over the past 15 years, the shares of individual regions in the global trade have changed significantly, whereby the decreasing share of the eu is accompanied by increasing shares of the developing countries, including the asian countries. globally, foreign trade expressed as percentage of the gdp increased from the average 19 % of the gdp between 1980 and 1989 up to 25 % between 2000 and 2004. table 1. shares of individual regions in global trade % total developed countries us ue15 developing countries asia source : imf direction of trade statistics bis 75 annual report, 2005. th ciccarelli, mojon “ global inflation ”, central bank of chile working papers no 357, december 2005. global capital flows keep growing even more dynamically, whereby the share of the global fdi in the global gdp increased from 8 % in 1989 to 22. 1 % in 2003, and foreign assets expressed as percentage of the gdp increased from 62. 6 % of the gdp to 186. 1 % of the gdp, respectively. as evidenced, the role of trade and financial links between enterprises in various countries has become more important over recent years. previously, in response to growing fuel prices or costs of living, trade