The propensity of households to save has reached extraordinary levels since early 2020. This box analyses the drivers of this surge and tries to infer what they imply for private consumption as the pandemic is brought under control. On the one hand, …
In response to COVID-19 the euro area household saving rate reached unprecedented levels in the first half of 2020. First, lockdown measures prohibited households from consuming a large share of their normal expenditure basket, leading to forced …
The growth slowdown in 2018-2019 was characterised by a marked divergence of industrial production and retail sales. This box seeks to uncover whether the euro area economy was hit by aggregate or sectoral shocks in this period. It finds that most of …