UNECE Press conference: Policy response to the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19

Thank you for being with us for this press conference on the policy response to the socio economic consequences of the current pandemic in the UNEC region hosted by our Executive Secretary, Mrs Olga Algaeva, who is also Under Secretary General of the United Nations.

Before we begin and I give her the floor, I would just like to remind all of you to please identify yourselves.

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And that is all on my side.

I will now like to invite Olga Algayerova and the Secretary General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the UNEC to take the flow.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

It's my pleasure to be today with you and also thank you for your time and for the opportunity to share with you some updates from our economic and social response to the impact of COVID-19 crisis in our Pan European region.

I prepared for you one presentation.

I hope I will be allowed to share it with you now.

I hope you can see that is it fine Shan or not?

Yes.

OK, perfect.

Before I start, I would like to tell to all of you that this is unprecedented situation when we as the United Nations and our regional Commission for this region, we really call for solidarity, multilateralism and cooperation at all levels because we are fully engaged to support the UN wide response and global efforts.

And UNEC mobilised all our forces to assist our member states in our region and what is Pan Europe and region.

We will speak about it shortly in North America in response to this crisis.

So we are leveraging our tools, namely normative tools and policy expertise to support countries response and sustainable recovery, guided mainly by Agenda 2030.

And we don't want to come back to the brown recovery because we urge all countries in our region to make full use of our tools to support a resilient, sustainable and green recovery.

So I will start with my presentation.

Here it is.

I will really not elaborate on the whole situation, but just to make you some introduction into that.

As you know, UNEC is one of the five regional commissions.

We have 56 Member States, namely in Europe, North America, Central Asia, Caucasus and as you can see from this picture, our region is the mostly hit by the COVID-19 epidemics and also in the Southern Europe, as you see and the US, we display the highest rates of mortality in the world.

So and then we need to also engage our response on that situation, but namely on economic and social impact.

What are the main trends in the region?

Because we during the last months, we provided many analysis, many country meetings, many regional meetings.

And this is now I want to present you the main trends that we can see after so many analysis in our region.

The main you see impact, economic impact is contraction of GDP.

The estimates today speak about 6 to 7% and practically all countries in our region will experience this negative growth.

This forecast of 6 to 7% is based on the latest IMF forecast.

Yes, we expect recovery next year, but with the growth next year at less than 5%, so you see it will be not sufficient to offset output losses.

However, also the projections themselves remain very uncertain.

The second ballot point I have here large increases in unemployment.

What's clear and it's again is based on ILO projects on unemployment worldwide.

Also our region is specific by age population.

For instance, you'll see the impact in Italy and where we have 22% of population over 65 years.

We also focus on a specific impact of the situation on women and goals.

We together with other UN entities in our region, we are part of so-called issue based coalition on gender where UNEC contributed to the global as well as the regional policy recommendations, including inputs to the key messages and advocacy points for Europe and Central Asia on gender and position of women in this situation.

As you know, the crisis is hitting women and men differently and This is why we need this analysis and response.

Public health expenditures are very low, namely in the eastern part of our region, and This is why the capacity of health systems to react is also quite different, namely Central Asia, Caucasus and the Western Balkans, where the public spendings in health are particularly low on transport and trade and mobility.

We will speak separately because here UNEC has many tools and this is what we tried to to promote a better connectivity and mobility in the region from our very first last days of the crisis response.

Also, as Internet accessibility is very limited in namely eastern parts of our region, so it hinders teleworking and education because the developed countries are using that tools these days.

Also cross-border mobility restrictions.

Our countries have different capacities and different starting points regarding cross-border mobility restrictions and of course regarding also of closure of workplaces and education institutions.

Open economies is a specific issues because as we know and we will have a separate slide on that, open economies are specially vulnerable to shocks.

To continue with the trends, you see the name sectors of industries that are specifically affected by the situation, namely trade, restaurants, transport, tourism, travel or construction.

We see very bad trend in remittances.

And as you know, in some parts of our region, this is a main source of income for people living in in from remittances, labour migrants.

We see 100,000, maybe million of people migrating back from their countries of migration back home where they stay.

And it causes problems on both sides because they stay at home without salaries, without income.

And in the countries where they originally migrated, those countries are lacking labour force.

Good examples are Germany or Spain as well.

Italy, we can tell.

So this is a specific situation on labour migrants oil price prices because as you know some countries in our regional exporters of oil and gas.

However also on importers side where the prices of those commodities are going down is is creating the negative effects.

Also another commodity such as a copper on and or cotton, which have significant share in the exports of some programme countries are also falling massive capital outflow from emerging markets.

This has taken place in a context of from exactly emerging markets and pressure on exchange rates because low commodity prices reduce exports, worsening excess to finance is putting pressure on exchange rates.

Of course, rising prices of essential products.

We can see this is on both sides, supply and demand.

Supply is lower because closures and mobility restrictions are constraining supply and in countries with large devaluations, the cost of imported goods is increasing.

On demand side, loss of income and lower activity are reducing price pressures.

In short term, demand effects dominate.

However, in some countries, for some types of basic products, rising prices are a problem.

They will hit the most vulnerable in recovering phase.

Inflationary pressures will emerge.

I don't know whether you'll see the noise from the outside.

If you give me a minute, I will just shut the door.

Thank you.

Last but not least, we have a public and external debt that impede fiscal response in some low and middle, lower middle income countries and we have also the upper middle income countries in the region.

Public debt has grown rapidly in recent years.

A large share of this debt is often denominated in foreign currency, which makes it sensitive to exchange rate depreciations.

Among the programme countries that we have 17 in our region, a few already display **** levels of external debt.

All these indicators will worsen significantly with the crisis.

With limited fiscal space and limited access to external finance, the role of official financing will be key in voiding better adjustment.

As you As you will see from my next slides, multilateral lenders are stepping up emergency provisions in the region.

The first emergency finance worldwide was granted to Pyrgyzstan.

Many other countries have received or are negotiating increased financing under under different financing windows.

The debt moratorium agreed by the G20 will benefit, namely low income countries like Kyrgyzstan, Mogaba, Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.

I will focus in my next slides or in my presentation on countries with on with economies in transition.

Those were the UN has a presence, we call them programme countries and they are in Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Western Balkans, plus mostly for comparison with Russian Federation.

These countries are quite diverse in terms of population structure, level of economic development and specialisation and as well as in policy space.

In these countries the potential vulnerability is very **** and the economic impact is exposing a number of pre-existing fragilities.

COVID-19 has prompted governments to adopt drastic measures to contain it's spread.

The economies of the region are suffering multiple economic shocks.

As you can see from the slide, we have a supply shock, demand shock and a financing shock.

Just I'll let you some time to digest this slide.

And those 17 programme countries in our region also show significant differences on exposure to different shocks, vulnerability in capacities.

Regarding policy responses, we were speaking about open economies and namely small and open economies are more vulnerable to external shocks given the relative importance of their exports and imports.

And you see this percentage of GDP is was quite **** before the crisis.

So we can just extrapolate that this is the case.

Also today we are speaking also about some industry sectors and namely travel and tourism.

You can see on the slide that they are being hit strongly and namely without a clear end date.

The sector has been a factor of economic dynamism in some countries like Georgia, Montenegro, but also in the EU.

We have a Greece, Italy, where tourism and travel play a significant, significant role in contribution to GDP.

We're speaking about remittances.

As you can see, they are a major source of income and foreign exchange in many programme countries.

And today they are declining sharply because of lower activity and because of mobility restrictions.

You see the impact in Europe and Central Asia is the biggest from another regions of the of the world.

The crisis requires a massive fiscal response, but the capacity of of of our programme countries to provide this response are limited by existing fiscal space, typical constraints of emerging markets to borrow in their own currency.

We have brought some examples from IMF emergency financing to some selected countries.

You can see the World Bank will disburse 486 million in Europe and Central Asia and we also negotiated a debt moratorium from the low income countries.

So what does the future hold?

First of all, we have significant degree of uncertainty about future.

Some global financial risks have abated, but others are still lurking.

It's also clear that a recovery next year will be insufficient to offset output losses.

The longer the slump last, the harder it would be to avoid permanent damage to productive capacity.

That puts growth on a lower trend.

And as we attempt to offset the impact of the crisis, we need to start building the recovery we want.

And this recovery, as our Secretary General told, must be green and inclusive.

We can take some lessons learned from euro area during the global financial crisis that shows us the implication of falling to a permanently low growth trend in terms of loss output.

And this is a danger that we need to avoid now.

You can see from the chart that there is not just a deep but there is a permanent shift to a trend below the pre crisis.

So what needs to be done?

We identified several things that we hope can help and this is to reduce this uncertainty.

So it means to recommit to existing frameworks for cooperation to reestablish the trust in concerted action.

We speak again about cooperation, solidarity and multilateralism.

To rebuild resistant economic damage is likely requiring continued policy support.

Reconnect all those disruptions to trade and transport, and we will speak about it later.

And to rethink new approaches for resiliency and efficiency and to regionalise.

And it's already recognised at the global level that recovery will be namely based in, in the regional response.

So what response we can expect from us from the UNEC?

Of course, our main task is to address the regional issues and I have indicated some of them.

However, every day I meet our country teams in our programme countries and we try to listen to the governments, to the UN country teams, to our new generation of resident coordinators who are on place.

And it's very useful for us to to provide the corresponding measures.

So the response runs on all levels on the global for us on the regional namely it means on transboundary cross-border issues.

But we listen very carefully to the local level.

Let's come to our policy tools that we can use.

So here you can see we created much bigger table of our tools that can help our country, teams and governments to use them.

We divided them on emergency measures and on long or mid or long term recovery measures.

This is just a small example that illustrates a few of our normative and policy tools that can support countries recovery around these three areas, namely connectivity, transboundary and other risks and to support green and resilient recovery.

I selected in my next slides some examples of that, but these are the main areas that we want to address.

So first, facilitate connectivity.

We have many tools in UNEC to facilitate connectivity but it was also on the global level.

The Secretary General urged all countries to facilitate the free flow of essential goods across the borders, across the regions.

And among the measures he has recommended is the use of paperless border crossing procedure such as UNEC has available.

It is for the E tier electronic tier of the TIR Global Customs Transit Systems administered by UNSC.

As you know, let me stop little bit on tier.

This tier connects over 70 economies around the world, not only in our region, including the EU, China, India, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and landlocked developing countries including all of Central Asia and Afghanistan and tier.

Using the tier provides an opportunity to cut transport times by up to 80% and cost of transport by up to 40%, and this can help to maintain or resilient trade from safely and securely.

The digitalized ether system can reduce viral transmission risk by minimising physical contact between the customs officers and truck drivers while helping supply chains remain operational.

To support connectivity, we also launch an observatory on the border crossing status that you can find on our website and that observatory gathers all information on cross-border limitations worldwide directly from governments, partner organisations on and from the transport sector.

As we as I did when we launched the observatory on 24th of March already.

I urge all countries to facilitate the flow of goods, especially essential products like food and medical supplies, to maximum extent possible and to make full use of available mechanism, including the UN conventions to enable coordinated measures.

UNIC, as you know, is offering also hundreds of freely available standards and recommendations for trade facilitation that enable dematerialized trade procedures throughout global supply chains.

These tools include single window, single submission portals, e-business standards, data pipeline, Internet of Things, very smart containers that can capture information from objects without any human intervention, and electronic documents such as ECMR, E invoice and reference data models.

What we try to do is reducing person to person contacting trade processes and supply chains, and these tools can reduce the spread of the virus.

Last but not least, through policy advice, we help countries remove regulatory and procedural barriers to trade.

Our studies have helped or are still helping Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan to harness trade and integration into regional and global value chains as a tool Dr sustainable development.

This will be particularly important in the coming months to recover from the crisis.

2nd, to address France boundary and other risks in countries response and recovery.

As you see water and sanitation, for example, a major challenge right now with this pandemic is to ensure universal access to clean water and sanitation.

In the Pan European region alone, 140 million people lack access to clean water and 36 million lack access to basic sanitation.

Our joint UNECW Jo Europe Protocol on Water and Health supports countries to uphold these basic human rights.

Between 2010 and 2015 / 19 million people gained access to basic drinking water sources following its entry into force.

I call again on all countries of the region to join and utilise this tool to ensure no one, like no one, is left behind and this will be particularly crucial in planning the reopening of schools for instance.

Environmental assessment.

Our protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment can help ensure that environmental and health considerations are taken into account in countries economic and regional development planning, including through obligatory consultation of environmental and health authorities and the public.

This allows a cohesive, integrated national approach that goes beyond the limits of individual economic sectors.

Governments could use this instrument to consider health risks and mitigation measures for pandemics as part of their planning procedures.

And this protocol is open to accession by all the UN Member States, not only from our region, and we stand ready to support countries in joining and applying it.

On agriculture, the confinement, social distancing and travel restrictions measures are also impacting the region's Food and Agriculture sectors and global supply chains.

The Food Outlook Web platform we have launched to support analysis in response to the situation highlights significant impacts on demand and supply, imports and exports, and workforce shortages.

In this challenging context, UNDC resources can help ensure food security by tackling food loss and waste along supply chains.

These tools already support improved measurement of loss and waste and offer guidance for better handling of produce.

We will soon pilot a smart food loss management system which will open up new online markets to sell and redistribute otherwise wasted food.

Additionally, our UNC FACT electronic standards are used for the electronic exchange of sanitary certificates in the agricultural sector, including in the international trade of animals and animal products or statistics.

That is seems to be very important these days for our Member States.

We are faced with the current emergency.

Policy makers must take hard decisions and both moves quickly and transparently, and such decisions that depend, of course, on solid data from trustworthy sources, making official statistics issued by national statistical offices more crucial than ever.

And this is especially needed to cut through the rising tide of rumour or misinformation and so-called fake news or conspiration messages.

However, national statistical offices are faced with double challenge of massively increased demand and **** unavailability of economic agents to take part in surveys which form a good deal of the methods used to produce official statistics and this will be a particular problem to produce state-of-the-art consumer price indexes.

UNEC has created an online platform for national statistical offices to guide statistical procedures across the region towards existing resources and practical initiatives taken by countries.

UNEC resources in this area range from recommendations on harnessing official statistics to strengthen disaster risk management to guidance on compiling economic statistics.

We are also providing updates, statistical resources and policy tools specifically related to issues of older populations, which as you know, are among the most vulnerable.

We also provide risk management guidance and best practise support, helping regulatory authorities to better respond to the needs of consumer, citizens and communities.

And as the third, we we offer tools to support a green and resilient recovery coming out of this pandemic.

We cannot simply return to business as usual.

And also Secretary General made it very, very clear and we have our road map in the form of 2030 Agenda and it's SDGS which must guide our recovery efforts so we emerge from this crisis stronger and more resilient to future shocks.

Countries must seize this opportunity to shift track from unsustainable practises, charting a course for a green recovery, not a brown recovery.

For this, it's essential that a massive investments being made by governments and multilateral financial institutions are channelled towards this green transition.

As you see better management of natural resources, 1 of fundamental challenges to better manage natural resources.

Today, the materials required for the much needed green energy transition are often concentrated in a few countries only.

These resources include copper, cobalt, lithium, rear earth elements that are used in solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle motors, wind turbines and fuel cells.

And This is why we have our UN Framework Classification for resources or shortly UMFC, that can help to identify alternative production options covering both conventional and unconventional sources.

It can also facilitate resource recovery for materials otherwise considered as waste, making the circular economy a reality.

This tool is being increasingly used worldwide, including by the European Commission for its battery production strategy, and is ready to be scaled up even further.

Another example is mobility.

Our 59 United Nations Inland Transport Conventions provide countries with a harmonised legal and regulatory framework for greater sustainability, covering, for example, regulations for electric vehicles and reduce transport emissions, and agreements to unlock more efficient freight transport by shifting from road to rail and inland waterway.

The travel restrictions and confinement measures in place around the world call for us to critically reassess the mobility that societies have until now taken for granted and adopt new models.

We will need to draw conclusions from the success of teleworking on a massive scale experience during the confinement.

As we have seen from the past six weeks.

This can deliver reductions in congestion, in CO2 emissions, in air pollution, while increasing safety on the roads.

We recently presented to you our policy guidance on reducing car use in cities after the pandemic, drawing on good practises from across the region to help monitor the broader transport situation.

To help devise policy responses, UNDC has also launched a platform centralising available data on the impact of COVID-19 on transport in the region.

We can already see the immediate impact in some areas.

For instance, France and Sweden reported a 39% drop in Rd fatalities for March 2020 compared to March 2019.

In Italy, vehicle registrations, which offer an insight into economic activity, were down by 85% in March 2020 compared to 2019.

On resilient cities at the local level, UNIC tools support performance evaluation of cities.

This promotes holistic urban management and innovation, including to better preparedness for cities.

For instance, as a result of our collaboration on its Smart Sustainable City profile, the city was in sense in Ukraine put in place a range of measures to strengthen the local health system and strengthening the local resilience to emergencies will be the focus of our first forum of mayors to be held on October 6th here in Geneva.

First, one of these nature based solutions.

We also support countries of the region to harness cost effective nature based solutions such as restoring degraded and deforested landscapes.

This can bring significant benefits to climate action, biodiversity, unlock green economic growth opportunities.

We have already assisted countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia in their commitment to restore over 3,000,000 hectares of degraded land by 20-30 and we are working to scale up commitments across the region.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my last slide.

So let us come to support and green and resilient recovery 1st.

We have resilient infrastructure and public services.

Our guiding principles on People First, PPPs or the SDGS consider resilience as a key aspect in the design of infrastructure and the delivery of public services.

There are key ingredients for sustainability in the face of epidemics like COVID-19 and also other emergencies.

These principles can for instance, supple the resilience in hull systems and in water supply, which are essential for for instance hand washing.

Energy efficient buildings is another tangible example.

Countries can implement UNCUNECS Framework guidelines for for energy efficiency standards in buildings to unlock rapid climate gains.

Today, buildings account for approximately 1/3 of total final energy consumption and almost 40% of CO2 emissions.

Innovation can contribute to the immediate and short term pandemic response and to long term resilience.

While the COVID-19 focus may now be on cutting edge research to combat the virus, the better countries innovation systems, the better they will embody and adopt and adapt **** end solutions that leverage the latest scientific and technological advances and following the crisis, this can offer solutions to rebuild economies in a more sustainable and resilient way.

Our Innovation for Sustainable Development reviews help countries harness the full potential of innovation.

Last but not least, multilateral, multilateral environmental agreements.

They offer also proven tools to help countries to rebuild better and to deliver on the SDGS.

This include, for instance, Water Convention, which provides a legal framework for countries to manage shared water resources, which is essential to climate change adoption adaptation and can help channel investment for basin wide measures.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are just a few examples of the practical tools that are available to support countries green recovery and I call on all countries to make full use of our tools and instruments.

Thank you so much for your attention.

And now I'm open to any of your questions.

I hope I will be able to answer them.

Thank you, dear Olga for this presentation.

I would now like to open the floor to questions.

And as far as I could see, the first question was from Maya plans from the shift.

Maya, you have the floor.

Yes, hello.

Thank you very much.

Secretary Algarrov.

My.

Question is related to the.

Forum of.

Mayors, that is scheduled.

To happen in October.

How are you going to organise?

Are you planning to do it completely online or are you still looking at the alternatives of doing it real in in person meetings?

Thank you for your question.

At the moment we really hope that we can do it in physical presence of the mayors.

We really hope that we can do that.

However, of course, we are already thinking about alternative doing it in a, in a in online mode or in virtual mode.

It would be really pity because as you know this would be the first UN gathering of the mayors with such agenda that we have prepared.

You can see also we have many videos on our website on agenda and what is prepared for.

We are very ambitious really in our work with the mayors and with the cities.

So it would be really pity if we cannot do it in physical presence, but this is what we plan at the moment.

However, as mentioned, we need to think about some alternative solution.

If it's it's OK to respond or if your question is more specific, just ask me please.

Thank you, Olga.

Any other question from the floor?

Let me check.

Anybody raising their hands?

Yes, I see Peter Kenny.

So, Peter, you have the floor.

Hello, the Secretary General.

My name is Peter Kenny.

I'm a freelance journalist.

I would like you to just elaborate a bit more on some of the unintended consequences perhaps of the COVID-19 epidemic on traffic and the decrease in traffic air pollution.

Yes, good question.

Of course, as I mentioned in my presentation, this was our first output when we saw the not coordinated, not harmonised closing the borders by individual countries in the region.

And of course it was needed from the health or medical point of view.

However, the disconnection in transport and and supply chains on essential goods, it created those situations where we already see lack of some basic food or fruits in some parts of the region.

As I mentioned, the rising prices, we have seen 10s of kilometres of trucks standing on the border crossings, some trucks with live animals on the boat, what was of course dangerous because then it could cause another epidemic or pandemic.

So we, we have called and we tried to.

This is why we created this observatory and we tried to open some green corridors for essential goods flowing from and to to the countries across the border.

I believe we managed today.

Of course, your question is very right because the House authorities try to closing isolating and the transport people and mobility people tried to connect things.

So where to find the right balance, you know, And the best for me is again multilateral cooperation because if we harmonise the measures in individual state, because I don't need to explain, it's obvious that if the border is open from one side and close from another side, so it doesn't work.

So This is why we need the regional and the trans border and cross-border cooperation.

With having this in mind, the the like Contra acting forces of the health institutions and transport companies or transport operators we created currently in regional discussion where the transport people talk together with The Who and health people.

And I hope them that they come with some some harmonised and coordinated multilateral response and then we can come with recommendations to Member States.

So we just were able with our observatory, with our call to on countries to open the green corridors for essential goods to, to make some emergency response to the situation.

That came up very immediately as a very immediate response.

But now we really try to find some more systematic solution.

Are you OK with that answer, please?

Or if you have more specific question on that.

Thank you, Olga.

I'm turning again to the list of journalist participants and maybe Peter has a follow up to to your answer.

Peter.

Could could you be a bit more specific about the exact places where the blockages are, which countries or which regions they are occurring?

Yes, what we know, there are some blockages in Central Asia and namely the low income countries like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are liking disconnectivity.

But it was the case also in in, in the EU member states, for instance, Slovak, it was between Slovakia and Hungary.

You know, it blocked the whole capital in Slovakia because the capital is so close to the border.

There were 10s of kilometres of truck spending.

So today the situation is already released, but we speak about the last six weeks.

It really we know that the examples Moldava is speaking about such such a gap in connectivity.

Let me let me maybe add for you, Peter and for the, for the others that the on the page of our observatory, you can find information on measures that have been adopted or announced by governments and or by customs authorities for more than 100 countries.

And the information there is provided by our partners in this observatory, which include all the the other four regional commissions plus a variety of other partners, including the IRU, the ITF or the FIA.

So if you want to have a look at the observatory, you can find some more details coming to you, Peter, we don't have, I've just looked now with while Olga was answering to you.

We don't have, I see information on South Africa specifically, but we have information on a couple of other African countries and from all the other regions as well.

Maybe another, another question from the floor.

Let me check if I see any any hands raised.

I don't see any further time being.

Let me check again.

I don't see any further hand raised.

Maybe Olga, you would like to add 1 one more remark before we conclude.

Yes, John, with pleasure.

Thank you again.

These days the journalists are very important.

What a message because people are scurred and it's very important to let people know that the UN system is working.

We are continuing our business.

We are really adapting to the situation as we've seen we had immediate emergency responses.

However, UNEC is more built on on mid and long term recovery measures where we want to come back to more sustainable world, not to the Brown recovery.

And this is an important message that I would really would be happy if you can provide to the broad public that our business continues.

We are working everyday also in difficult for us conditions because our staff was also under the ****** of this epidemic.

And but we mobilised our cooperation and coordination with our 56 member states, with the government, we re established connections in the region with the country teams and we simply work for people to overcome this and come out of the situation even stronger if possible.

And my last work made the words maybe go to the situation after the Second World War where Economic Commission for Europe played a significant role in post crisis recovery.

And we are here, we are committed to play the same similar important role in a post crisis recovery and to to implement Agenda 2030 even more intensively and better for our countries in the region.

So this is the message and I will be very happy if you can help us to provide this message.

And I hope I proved it on This is why my presentation was maybe boring and little bit technical and little bit long.

But you can see so many tools and instruments that are available in our workshop that even I was not able to mention all of them, just the groups of them.

So here we are.

We need to intensify the world.

We need to bring more financing to the region from either international institutions or private sector.

But our tools are relevant and valid, and we have maximally committed to implement them in our Member States.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Olga.

And as I don't see any further hands having raised, then we will conclude with your words this virtual press conference.

Thank you very much to all for participating.

Goodbye.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Thank you for your time.