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2008 Q1 The Agents' scores: a review (481k)
By Jacqueline Dwyer of the Bank's Inflation Report and Bulletin Division.
The Bank's Agents collect economic intelligence from the business community around the United Kingdom, enriching the range of information available to the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This intelligence is largely qualitative, and provides timely insights into economic conditions and behaviour not available from published data alone. While the greatest value from their intelligence gathering is such insight, Agents also make quantitative judgements about economic conditions in the form of a series of scores. With a decade of scores now available, this article reviews their properties and usefulness. The scores are found to be well correlated with many official data series, with correlations tending to increase through time. Some scores are also useful in predicting revisions to official data, or capturing major turning points in economic activity. Consequently, they make a valuable addition to the broad suite of information reviewed by the MPC in its policy deliberations.
Winter 2005

Introducing the Agents’ scores (708k)
(by Colin Ellis of the Bank’s Inflation Report and Bulletin Division and Tim Pike of the Bank’s Agency for the South East and East Anglia). Each month, the Bank’s twelve Agents make quantitative assessments of economic conditions as seen from their respective countries and regions. These scores provide numerical measures of the intelligence that the Agents gather from month to month, and cover some areas of the economy where there are no official statistics. The scores are also timely and some have a high correlation with subsequently published ONS data. As such, they can be useful indicators of the current economic conjuncture. This article examines the scores that have been used in the regular MPC process since 1997. From January 2006, the scores will be published on the Bank’s internet site.

Spring 2003 The Bank's regional Agencies (65k)
(by Phil Eckersley, the Bank's Agent for Northern Ireland and Pamela Webber, of the Bank's Inflation Report and Bulletin Division). This article describes the work of the Bank's regional Agencies, updating that published in the November 1997 Quarterly Bulletin. It outlines, in particular, the contribution of the Agencies to the work of the Monetary Policy Committee.
November 1997 The Bank's regional Agencies (44k)
(by John Beverly, the Bank's Agent for the West Midlands). In this article, John Beverly describes the role of the Bank's Agencies. He first sets out a brief history of the Bank's regional representation; the rest of the article outlines the present work of the Agencies within the new monetary policy framework.
May 1996

Bank of England Agents' summary of business conditions (197k)
The Bank is publishing the first quarterly summary of the reports on current business conditions that it receives from its Agents in the regions. The first edition of the summary is enclosed with this copy of the Bulletin.
[The latest issue of the Agents summary of business conditions is always available as a pdf file.]

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  • Inflation Report
    Sets out the detailed economic analysis and inflation projections on which the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee bases its interest rate decisions, and presents an assessment of the prospects for UK inflation over the following two years.
  • The Bank's Regional Agencies
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