EMU Lab | Navigating an uncertain world – conversation with Odile Renaud-Basso, President of EBRD

Welcome all those who have escaped the exams. We are glad you are here. Today we host Odile Renaud-Basso, welcome to the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute, EMU Lab. Let me say a few words to start, then Odile will take the floor for some initial remarks. We are going to experiment with a format that is a bit different from the classic lecture. After the initial remarks by Odile, we will have a conversation between the two of us, then we open the floor, then Gian Carlo will draw some conclusions at the end. Odile is President of the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is a quite extraordinary animal in the institutional panorama worldwide. It was established back in 1991. It showed how crisis motivates speed: President Mitterrand came up with the idea in October 1989, and 18 months later it was inaugurated. It has 75 country shareholders, and it is the only multilateral development bank worldwide where European countries have a majority, 54%. The US has about 10%. It is quite an original construction. Given the fragmentation we see worldwide, looking at policy and economic challenges through the eyes of this institution is interesting to learn how cooperation can be established or revived. So internal and external fragmentation is what we are going to talk about today. Odile has been President of the EBRD since October 2020, the seventh president. She has a unique curriculum: before becoming president, she was head of the French Treasury, and before that she worked directly with me in Brussels at the European Commission for five years. I am particularly glad she accepted to come. In Brussels she was deputy chief of staff to Herman Van Rompuy from 2012, a period of big moves and big risks: the Brexit crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, the establishment of the EFSF and ESM. She brings the perspective of her present job, but we will also push her on her past experience. This event is part of the EMU Lab, an initiative by Gian Carlo, Pier, and myself, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. We are organizing many events, aiming to publish by the end of the year the Florence Report, provisionally titled 'Reconfiguring Europe: Policy Space and Fragmentation'. When we started the project, we thought about fragmentation more as an internal issue within the EU; now fragmentation is also big on the external side. As a little announcement, this is the French month of the EMU Lab: we will have François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, on June 19th. Those here are warmly invited. Odile, you have the floor.