When Chiara Scotti, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, took to the podium at the 6th Dolomiti Macro Meeting in Bozen on 20 June 2026, she did so with a deliberately ambitious framing. Her address — titled "From the Winter Olympics to the digital euro: A dialogue between academia and central banks" — was not merely a ceremonial keynote. It was a pointed institutional statement about where European monetary policy thinking now stands, and where it must travel next.
The choice of venue matters as much as the message. The Dolomiti Macro Meeting, organised jointly by the Free University of Bozen, the BI Norwegian Business School, and the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices (CAMP), occupies a distinctive niche in the European academic calendar. It sits precisely at the intersection of rigorous quantitative macroeconomics and applied policy questions — the kind of forum where a central banker can speak with unusual candour about live institutional challenges without triggering market-moving headlines. Scotti's decision to anchor her remarks around the digital euro signals that the European Central Bank's prospective retail central bank digital currency is no longer a subject confined to technical working groups. It has become a primary concern at the senior leadership level of national central banks across the Eurosystem.
The conceptual arc of Scotti's speech — bridging the spectacle of the Winter Olympics and the mechanics of the digital euro — is more than rhetorical flourish. It reflects a genuine methodological argument: that large, complex, multi-stakeholder public projects require the kind of systematic data analysis, scenario modelling, and incentive design that academic macroeconomics is uniquely equipped to provide. Central banks, in this reading, are not simply policy-executing institutions. They are, or ought to be, consumers and co-producers of frontier research — particularly when navigating technological transformations as consequential as the shift toward digital sovereign money.
The digital euro project, now well into its preparation phase under ECB oversight, represents one of the most significant monetary architecture decisions the Eurosystem has faced since the introduction of euro banknotes in 2002. The stakes are considerable. A retail digital euro would directly touch the payments habits of approximately 350 million citizens across the euro area, reshape the competitive dynamics between commercial banks and the central bank, and raise profound questions about financial privacy, monetary transmission, and the role of public money in a digitising economy. That a Deputy Governor of Italy's central bank chose to foreground this project at a gathering of academic macroeconomists — rather than, say, a fintech industry conference — speaks to the intellectual seriousness with which the Eurosystem is approaching the design challenge.
The broader dialogue Scotti was advocating — between the research community and monetary institutions — reflects a structural shift in how central banks operate in an era of compounding complexity. The post-pandemic period demonstrated with unusual clarity that the standard macroeconomic toolkit, built on assumptions of relative stability and well-anchored expectations, could be strained by simultaneous supply shocks, fiscal dominance pressures, and shifting transmission mechanisms. The Bank for International Settlements and major central banks have increasingly responded by deepening their research partnerships with universities, funding working papers, and creating structured dialogue forums — precisely the model that the Dolomiti Macro Meeting embodies.
In this context, Scotti's speech at Bozen functions as an invitation as much as an address. She was calling on academic macroeconomists to treat the digital euro not as an exotic policy curiosity but as a first-order research agenda — one demanding rigorous work on monetary equilibrium under dual monetary systems, consumer adoption dynamics, banking sector disintermediation risks, and cross-border payment architecture. These are questions that neither central bank staff alone nor academic economists working in isolation are well-positioned to resolve. They require the kind of sustained, iterative collaboration that forums like the Dolomiti Macro Meeting are built to foster.
What This Means for the Digital Euro's Trajectory
The significance of Scotti's intervention extends beyond the academic setting. When a senior official of the Bank of Italy — one of the Eurosystem's most influential national central banks — dedicates a major public speech to positioning the digital euro as a live policy frontier requiring deeper academic partnership, it confirms that the project is advancing through its institutional architecture with momentum. The preparation phase, which the ECB launched in late 2023, involves design decisions that will have decade-long consequences for European monetary sovereignty. The engagement of national central bank leadership in shaping the surrounding intellectual debate is a necessary condition for the political and institutional legitimacy the digital euro will ultimately require. Scotti's remarks in Bozen represent a small but telling marker in that longer process.
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