The effective interest rates you mentioned before, 3.4%, those are market rates that reflect that structure. If we have more long-term debt and less short-term debt, this average rate will be higher. If we have more short-term debt, it will be lower.
This reflects two things: a structure for debt over time, and also the fact that both long- and short-term interest rates have been falling in recent years, so a fall in the effective rate reflects when we admit new debt, we admit at lower rates than all the debt we roll over from the past. Rates have been going down so the effective rate is falling.
On the pension, which is your real question, it's a long-term rate, a ten-year rate, a ten-year-plus in fact, that we use to book our pension liabilities. It's not a rate we pay to anybody. It's a rate we use to factor in our liabilities in public accounts. That rate allows us to calculate the current value of our liabilities, and also to account for those liabilities over time, both now in the current year and also in the future. We use that rate to do that. It's a benchmark rate. It's not something we're paying to anybody. It's a way to ensure our liabilities are recorded in public accounts in an accurate way.
Since pensions are long-term liabilities, we use long-term rates to account for that. It's more a shadow rate, “what if”, than a real rate.