Distinguished Speaker Seminars

Ignazio Visco, deputy director general of the Bank of Italy, shed light on the eurozone's pressing challenges, with a focus on four points that will shape the EU's recovery and the strength of the monetary union: recovery and monetary policy, the fiscal outlook, imbalances and domestic demand, and re-absorbing the unemployed and fostering growth. Mr. Visco recognized the urgency of fundamental structural reforms to raise potential output in the eurozone that would create room for monetary policy actions without raising inflation.

Unless new structural measures are adopted that would shift demand from deficit to surplus countries, recovery in the eurozone is likely to be short-lived, in Mr. Visco's opinion.

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To avoid protectionism, stimulate the domestic economy—that was a key message from Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee professor of economics and professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley, at an ADBI seminar on 3 March. In discussing the similarities and differences between the Great Depression and the current global financial crisis, Mr. Eichengreen noted that in the 1930s, stimulus meant monetary stimulus, which benefited the initiating country at the expense of its trading partners. Today, countries have been applying fiscal stimulus policies that benefit their neighbors. But the initiating country, seeing neighbors who are free-riding, has an incentive to resort to protectionist measures. Now it is the

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US President Barack Obama is confronting a range of political and economic challenges amid a global recession as he tries to formulate US trade policy objectives and a strategy to achieve them, Clayton Yeutter, former US trade representative and secretary of agriculture, said in a seminar on 23 March. A key plank of the strategy will be the newly launched National Export Initiative, which aims to double US exports to US$3 trillion over the next five years. Mr. Yeutter noted that an open, rules-based trading system has brought major gains to US producers and consumers, and concluded that inaction on trade is highly costly to the US economy.

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