Chiara Scotti, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, used a high-profile gathering of macroeconomists in the Dolomites to argue that the relationship between academic research and central bank policymaking is not merely useful — it is structurally indispensable, particularly as the Eurosystem accelerates its work on the digital euro. The remarks, delivered on 20 June 2026 at the 6th Dolomiti Macro Meeting in Bozen and subsequently published by the Bank for International Settlements, carry weight beyond the alpine venue: they signal how senior European monetary officials are framing the intellectual foundations of one of the most consequential monetary experiments of this decade.
A Forum Built for Cross-Pollination
The Dolomiti Macro Meeting is not a typical central bank symposium. Jointly organised by the Free University of Bozen, BI Norwegian Business School, and the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices (CAMP), the event is explicitly designed to dissolve the boundary between theoretical economics and institutional policy work. That structural mission made it a fitting platform for Scotti, whose speech drew a deliberate arc from the seemingly unrelated world of competitive sport — specifically the Winter Olympics — to the granular complexities of central bank digital currency design. The rhetorical bridge was intentional: both domains, she suggested, demand rigorous preparation, real-time data interpretation, and the willingness to act decisively under uncertainty.
Why the Digital Euro Needs Academic Scaffolding
The digital euro — the European Central Bank's proposed retail central bank digital currency for the euro area — is entering a phase where policy decisions carry long-term architectural consequences. Questions around privacy design, intermediation models, holding limits, and monetary transmission are not simply technical; they are deeply macroeconomic. Scotti's decision to address these themes at a gathering of academic macroeconomists reflects a recognition within the Eurosystem that the theoretical frameworks being developed in universities today will shape the policy toolkit of tomorrow.
This is not a trivial observation. Central bank digital currency design involves trade-offs that conventional monetary economics has only recently begun to model with precision. How does the introduction of a digital euro affect bank deposit dynamics during stress periods? What are the implications for credit supply if households shift balances away from commercial banks toward a sovereign digital instrument? These questions sit squarely in the domain of academic macroeconomics, and Scotti's presence at Bozen was, at least in part, a signal that the Bank of Italy views the research community as a genuine partner rather than a passive commentator.
The Academia-Central Bank Dialogue: Structural, Not Occasional
One of the more substantive dimensions of Scotti's address was its framing of the central bank-academia relationship as structural rather than episodic. Too often, the exchange between monetary institutions and academic economists resembles a one-way flow: researchers publish, policymakers occasionally cite. What Scotti appeared to advocate — consistent with a broader shift visible across the Eurosystem and at the BIS — is a more iterative model, where research agendas are shaped partly by the empirical puzzles that central banks encounter in real time, and where central bank datasets and institutional knowledge flow back into academic inquiry.
The 6th Dolomiti Macro Meeting, with its tri-institutional architecture spanning Italy and Norway, embodies exactly that kind of cross-border, cross-sector collaboration. CAMP, the Norwegian research centre co-organising the event, has a track record of applied macroeconomic work on commodity pricing and financial cycles — areas directly relevant to the monetary policy questions European central banks are navigating as energy price volatility and structural inflation dynamics continue to complicate the rate outlook.
What This Means for the Digital Euro's Trajectory
For observers of the digital euro project, Scotti's speech at Bozen offers a useful interpretive signal. The Eurosystem is not treating the digital euro as a finished technical specification awaiting political approval. It is actively cultivating the intellectual ecosystem — academic conferences, research partnerships, published speeches — that will inform design choices as the project moves toward potential legislative finalization. The BIS's decision to publish the speech through its review series ensures that Scotti's framing reaches an international audience of central bankers and researchers beyond the euro area.
The invocation of the Winter Olympics as a metaphorical frame is also worth registering. High-performance sport and monetary policy share, in Scotti's construction, a common dependency on preparation quality and adaptability. As the digital euro moves from investigation to design to potential issuance, the quality of the intellectual preparation — much of it happening in academic institutions like those co-hosting the Dolomiti meeting — will materially affect how well the instrument performs under real-world conditions. That is a message directed not just at macroeconomists in Bozen, but at every institution shaping the future of European monetary infrastructure.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
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