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.