Stimulating economic recovery through euro area growth poles: call for more directed unconventional monetary policy measures?

Research background: Transfer of newly created money through unconventional monetary measures follows the official European Central Bank distribution key. Yet, it does not take into account the ability of individual countries to drive growth process in other economies. Money spent to boost domestic credit provisioning in growth pole-like economies is more likely to spill over to other adjoined economies and help them to recover, even in the presence of depressed domestic demand and/or overleveraged domestic banking sector. Purpose of the article: This paper reports growth pole scores for 19 euro area countries, and compares it to the official distribution key used to transmit newly created source of funding. Methods: We modify the procedure developed in World Bank (2011) for growth pole computation in order to account for strength of linkages connecting member states. Findings & Value added: Our results suggest that the official distribution key might not be completely optimal once looking at the growth pole scores. Countries small in economic size (Baltic states, Slovakia and Slovenia) would benefit from a more differentiated distribution, as they strongly outperform their benchmark set by the official distribution key. On the other hand, big euro area economies do not achieve the levels used in official distribution key, taking into account their growth pole potential for other euro area economies.