Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the Maurice Allais Foundation

Paris, 7 June 2024

It is an honour to be speaking to you today as part of your series of workshops in memory of Maurice Allais.

His contributions, in particular his work on general equilibrium theory and market efficiency, helped lay the theoretical foundations for the growth model that Western economies pursued after the Second World War.

As Maurice Allais once said, “what could be a better way of preparing for the aftermath of the war than to try to find a solution to the fundamental problem of any economy, namely how to promote the greatest feasible economic efficiency”.^[1]

In many ways, his vision was borne out. Prioritising efficiency, both in our internal economic affairs, such as developing the single European market, and in our external trade, led to a period of unprecedented sustained economic growth.

And as economies advanced along a path of steadily increasing potential output, central…