Welcome remarks by the Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras at the occasion of the Lecture by Mário Centeno on "The Euro, Labour Markets and the Transmission of ECB Monetary Policy"
14/11/2025 - Speeches
It is a great pleasure to welcome Mário Centeno to the Bank of Greece. Mário is an outstanding economist and policymaker, and a dear friend.
Mário’s career has been remarkable in both its breadth and its depth. Trained as an economist at the University of Lisbon and later at Harvard University, where he received his PhD, Mário rose from a labour market scholar to Portugal’s Finance Minister (2015–2020) and President of the Eurogroup (2018–2020), before taking over the reigns as Governor of the Bank of Portugal and member of the ECB Governing Council. Over these years, he turned academic rigor into genuine commitment to public service and real-world impact.
As Portugal’s Finance Minister, Mário mastered a rare balancing act, achieving both growth and budgetary discipline, thus delivering Portugal’s impressive economic recovery. Under his tenure, Portugal achieved its first budget surplus in decades and a remarkable decline in its public debt, while the unemployment rate was cut in half. In recognition of his role in leading the economic recovery in Portugal, in 2019 he was awarded Finance Minister of the Year for Europe by The Banker.
His election as President of the Eurogroup in 2017 was a recognition of his intellect, pragmatism, and his ability to build consensus across different perspectives. He drove forward significant reforms in euro area governance, especially on the strengthening of the banking union. His consensus-building leadership guided Eurogroup to the sealing of the exit of Greece from its third bailout programme. In the first half of 2020, he chaired endless hours of virtual marathons, orchestrating the comprehensive economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic – the capstone of his Eurogroup mandate. His statesmanship was particularly evident in moments of tension and complexity. It was on these grounds that, as President Lagarde reminded us at Mario’s last Governing Council meeting in September, he earned the recognition from Wolfgang Schauble as “the Cristiano Ronaldo of finance”.
I have had the privilege of witnessing firsthand his analytical mind and collaborative spirit in the five years that we sat around the ECB Governing Council table. During this period, we overcame a series of challenges to the euro area economy: from a pandemic to the most devastating war in Europe since World War II and the highest US tariffs in nearly a century. Throughout his tenure, Mário’s interventions were distinguished by their pragmatism, clarity of thought, and rare ability to bridge rigorous technical insight with a deeply human approach, coupled with his ever-warm smile.
Today, Mário will be presenting a topic dear to my heart: the profound challenges labour markets pose to monetary policy.
- In his interventions at the Governing Council, Mário has used his background as an important researcher on labour markets to show that, over time, the euro area has become a more efficient monetary union. This is because the structural reforms implemented in countries, such as Greece and Portugal, have increased both intra-country and inter-country labour mobility. As a result, the unemployment rate has decreased significantly during the past decade without igniting inflationary pressures, because the natural rate of unemployment has declined. In addition to the structural reforms, Mário has emphasized that immigration has made the euro-area labour market more efficient.
- At the same time, population ageing and artificial intelligence introduce a new set of monetary policy challenges, as they create uncertainty in wage–price dynamics and economic forecasting, key inputs in the path towards sustained price stability.
Mário, we have benefited from your valuable insights as they have been drawn from someone who has dedicated himself to studying labour dynamics, promoting labour market efficiency, and workers’ welfare, while at the same time having been a skillful monetary policy maker. I turn the floor over to you.