BIS - ChN - After the global crisis, which models of growth?

Keynote speech by Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, at the CIGS (The Canon Institute for Global Studies) – EHESS (Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) International Symposium “After the global crisis, which models of growth?”, Tokyo, 3 October 2011

"As we all know, debt sustainability depends on three variables: the primary surplus, the growth rate and the interest rate. The relationship between those three parameters and debt can be expressed through a simple equation, the famous “unpleasant arithmetic”. Assessing sustainability seems therefore relatively straightforward. Many economists and market analysts on sovereign European debt simply assume low growth and high interest rates forever in peripheral countries – which enables them to conclude categorically that debt is not sustainable. A (slightly) more sophisticated and developed version of that story takes account of the impossibility, for Euro economies, to depreciate their exchange rates, therefore locking them into a low competitiveness and no growth equilibrium. I see three major problems with those analyses.
First, the competitiveness story does not hold. Take the UK, for instance. Its effective real exchange rate has depreciated by 23% over the last four years. And its exports have grown by a healthy 15%, in nominal terms, over the first six months of 2011. But Italy, Spain and Greece have done even better, with exports growing respectively by 16%, 19% and 37% during that same period, and, of course, no exchange rate adjustment. Equating competitiveness with exchange rate depreciation is therefore overly simplistic. This does not mean that efforts to improve competitiveness in many parts of the euro area should not be strengthened..."

"...The euro area is also the only major currency union with its external accounts in balance, which is an essential element of robustness and a strong guarantee of long-term solvency...."

Source: http://www.bis.org/review/r111006h.pdf