Stefan Ingves: Long-term trends - important elements in the monetary policy analysis

Speech by Mr Stefan Ingves, Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank and Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, to the Swedish Economics Association, Stockholm, 7 May 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

I shall begin by thanking you for the invitation. Coming here to the Swedish Eco-nomics Association to discuss various issues concerning the Riksbank's activities is something I really appreciate and enjoy. Today's speech is actually the fourteenth I have given, so it is beginning to be rather a habit to come back here every year.

I intend to devote a large part of today's speech to the Swedish labour market and some of the overall trends and challenges it is facing, that is, what are usually known as "structural changes". In this context it may be worth reminding our-selves of the predictions of two famous economists. Almost 90 years ago, John Maynard Keynes predicted that the rapid automation of work tasks would lead to "technological unemployment". Another famous economist, Wassily Leontief, foresaw similar problems 20 years later: "Labour will become less and less im-portant ... More and more workers will be replaced by machines. I do not see that new industries can employ everybody who wants a job".