Mario Draghi na conferência de imprensa da reunião de 2012 em Barcelona onde destacou os problemas referentes à segmentação do mercado de trabalho Fonte: Bloomberg
A passagem de ano está a ser marcada por uma interessante discussão internacional sobre o papel dos todos poderosos bancos centrais. A Reserva Federal anunciou uma regra de médio longo prazo com enfoque na taxa de desemprego; o novo governador do Banco de Inglaterra admite trocar o objectivo de inflação por um baseado em PIB nominal; no Japão é a independência do banco central que é posta em causa em nome de políticas expansionistas. Na Europa, o BCE, com Draghi, tem testado os limites tradicionais do seu mandato, nomeadamente com a opção de compra de dívida pública para normalizar a fragmentação financeira no euro. Será que o BCE deveria ir mais longe?
Na sua última conferência de imprensa Mario Draghi foi cuidadoso nas respostas, mas deixou claro que o emprego não faz parte do seu mandato, um mandato que se esgota na estabilidade de preços e nos instrumentos necessários para fazer a política monetária funcionar.
Questionado sobre a implicação da fragmentação dos mercados de trabalho na Zona Euro para a política monetária, Mario Draghi deixa claro que não deve haver confusões sobre o papel do BCE. “Tenha presente que o nosso mandato não tem o pleno emprego, como o mandato dual da Reserva Federal”. E quando à estabilidade de preços “mostrámos como se faz”, acrescentou mais tarde.
Vale a pena ler duas perguntas e respostas da última conferência de imprensa em Frankfurt:
[Pergunta:] I want to go back to the labour markets. You talked about the decline in fragmentation in financial markets, but the fragmentation in the labour markets seems to be getting even more pronounced, especially in youth unemployment, which is almost 60% in Spain and 8% in Germany. Overall unemployment is over 25% in Spain and a little over 5% in Germany. At what point does this become an issue for monetary policy, and affects the transmission of monetary policy in the same way that the fragmentation of financial markets affects it? And why can’t the ECB maybe think about ways to lower this fragmentation if it gets to such an extreme level that it affects your ability to conduct monetary policy?
Draghi: As regards your first question there are several issues with and several angles from which you could look at unemployment, but just keep in mind that our mandate is not full employment, unlike the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve. Our mandate, and our statutory objective, is to maintain price stability. Having said that, unemployment and the level of economic activity are very important factors in our assessment of price stability, and we certainly want to look at the unemployment rate and analyse how much of it is structural and how much of it is cyclical. There are certainly some elements of structurally high unemployment in what we see today. You referred to one. What is the reason for such high youth unemployment? If all workers were treated the same, unemployment would be distributed uniformly across the working population. The fact that we observe such high figures for youth unemployment means that we often have dual labour markets in which there are the young with very little protection and the old, the others, with a lot of protection, so unemployment gets concentrated in the young part of the population. And we know that this is because the greater flexibility that has been introduced since the beginning of the year 2000 was basically concentrated on the young part of the population, so when the crisis came, they were the first ones to lose their jobs. The next question is why there is very little mobility in this unemployment. Why are the workers not moving from the areas where there is no demand to areas where the demand for labour is better? These are all structural factors. Another observation is that, when you look at output gaps, the significant levels of output gaps would justify lower levels of inflation than we actually have, which again seems to suggest that there are certain structural components in the unemployment rate. Monetary policy, even in general, cannot do much about that. And, finally, we believe that ensuring price stability actually gives you the long-term foundation for growth and job creation. But this does not mean that we do not take into account unemployment in economic activity, in our overall assessment of the situation and of prospects.
Na mesma conferência de imprensa, Draghi afastou também qualquer cenário de mudança de política pelo BCE:
[Pergunta:] The other question is about monetary policy. There seems to be a broad rethinking among some of your colleagues around the world on monetary policy strategy. The Bank of England is rethinking inflation targeting; the Fed has indicated their long-term guidance on rates. Could you give us a flavour if there is any discussion on that at the ECB, notwithstanding that of course you are bound by your mandate of keeping price stability? Was there any consideration that you might do anything like that in the future or even any comments on what your colleagues around the world are doing?
Draghi: I don’t want to comment in detail, really, but let me give you the bottom line of this after some reflection. Each central bank has its own institutional set-up, has its own statutory objectives and its mandate. Within this institutional set-up, within the statutory objectives, each central bank tries to steer private sector expectations. As far as our mandate goes, namely maintaining price stability, I think we’ve shown how to do it. And, basically, markets understood.
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