Unemployment has declined since the peak of the pandemic in August 2020, hitting a record low this April. But while more people have jobs, they are working fewer hours on average. In this post for The ECB Blog we shed light on this dichotomy and why it matters for the overall strength of the labour market. One could look at the euro area labour market and see a success story. After an initial drop at the beginning of the pandemic,...

Keynote speech by Luis de Guindos, Vice-President of the ECB, at the Annual Joint Conference of the European Commission and the European Central Bank on European Financial Integration | Brussels, 7 June 2023 | It is a great pleasure to be participating in this year’s joint conference on financial integration. This event offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on key developments in the financial sector over the past year and to reassess priorities for advancing the integration, development and safety...

Today, the European Commission and the World Health Organization (WHO) have announced the launch of a landmark digital health partnership. In June 2023, WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats. This is the first building block of the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) that will develop a wide range...

In 2020, the Commission´s nearly €100 billion SURE instrument designed to protect jobs and incomes affected by the COVID-19 pandemic supported about 31.5 million employees and self-employed people and over 2.5 million businesses. SURE effectively encouraged Member States to set up wide-ranging and ambitious short-time work schemes and similar measures at national level, which allowed firms to retain employees and skills, and supported the self-employed. Today's final bi-annual report on the implementation and impact of the SURE instrument shows that...

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models often work as opaque decision-making engines (black boxes); reaching conclusions without much transparency or explanations on how a given result is obtained. In an era where AI has become an integral part of our lives, where recruiters, healthcare providers, and other fields, rely on this tool to make decisions impacting individuals, understanding the way AI works is essential. Could Explainable Artificial Intelligence, or XAI, be a way forward, a potential solution? But, what is XAI,...

Can EU companies be both green and globally competitive? Tradeable allowances for carbon emissions set important price incentives for companies to become greener. Unfortunately, evidence shows that many companies move carbon intensive production to other regions, meaning their emissions leak abroad. This ECB Blog post investigates how the EU can strike a balance between green goals and competitiveness. One of the EU’s most powerful tools to fight climate change is the Emissions Trading System (ETS). It sets a cap on greenhouse...

Tighter financial conditions test resilience of households, firms, governments and property markets Financial markets are vulnerable to disorderly adjustments, given investment fund vulnerabilities, stretched valuations, high volatility and low liquidity Euro area banks robust to recent stress outside the euro area, but higher funding costs and lower asset quality may weigh on profitability According to the May 2023 Financial Stability Review published today by the European Central Bank (ECB), the outlook for euro area financial stability remains fragile, in the context...