Economic Experts Survey (EES)

The Economic Experts Survey (EES) is a quarterly survey of economic experts worldwide.The EES captures their assessment of the current economic policy and political performance as well as of special questions in their countries. The survey is jointly conducted by the ifo Institute and the Institute for Swiss Economic Policy.

Current Results

Facts — 19 Apr 2024

Economic Experts Survey: Further Decline in Inflation Expected in the Short Term (1st Quarter 2024)

How are economists’ expectations for future price developments evolving worldwide? Can we observe a decline in inflation expectations? The latest wave of the Economic Expert Survey (EES) by the ifo Institute and the Institute for Swiss Economic Policy examines economists’ inflation expectations at a global level. The result: although inflation expectations worldwide remain well above central banks’ inflation target, there is a further decline in the expected inflation rate for 2024 compared to previous quarters. However, long-term inflation expectations show a stagnating or rising trend.

Facts — 23 Jan 2024

Economic Experts Survey: Experts expect 2.6% Growth Worldwide (4th Quarter 2023)

Many countries around the world experienced a sharp decline in economic activity during the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by a gradual recovery. With high inflation, geopolitical conflicts, and ongoing supply chain disruptions, many regions of the world are once again facing uncertain economic development in the coming years. In the Economic Experts Survey for the fourth quarter of 2023, we therefore asked economic experts about their expectations for (real) GDP growth in 2024 (short-term forecasts) as well as in 2025 and 2027 (medium- and longer-term forecasts).

Facts — 5 Jan 2024

Economic Experts Survey: Decline in Inflation Expected in the New Year (Q4 2023)

How are economists’ expectations for future price developments evolving worldwide? Can we observe a decline in inflation expectations? The latest wave of the Economic Expert Survey (EES) by the ifo Institute and the Institute for Swiss Economic Policy examines economists’ inflation expectations at a global level. The result: although inflation expectations worldwide remain well above central banks’ inflation target, there is a further decline in the expected inflation rate for 2024 compared to previous quarters.

Previous Economic Experts Survey

Informationen
- The Economic Experts Survey (EES) tracks the quality of economic policy and political performance as evaluated by economic experts worldwide. It provides qualitative information in the form of assessments by those experts. Published quarterly, the EES results are timely and internationally comparable. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the EES also examines national Covid-19 management and related fiscal policies.
Methodology
- Status: Wave 1 (Q1 2022)
  
  1.   Expert Panel
  We recruit economic experts from two groups. The first are renowned economic experts working at universities, research institutes, central banks, multinational companies, embassies, and international organizations. Experts from this group are handpicked and have ties to the ifo Institute or the CESifo network. The second group are leading academics and researchers in economics according to international rankings. We contact the top experts in all listed countries. Experts from both group are influential and shape the public economic debates in their host country.
  
  2.   Implementation
  The EES runs quarterly and each EES wave runs over a period of two weeks. We contact the experts via email with an invitation to participate in the EES. The experts answer the questions online and can choose the country they wish to provide expertise for. In the survey, the experts are presented with the four core EES questions from two main areas, (1) economic policy and (2) political climate.
  
  Economic Policy
     1.   How do you rate your country’s current economic policy?
     2.   How well does your country’s economic policy address the challenges of the future?
  Political Climate
     3.   How do you rate the performance of your country’s current government?
     4.   How do you rate the stability of your country’s current political situation?
  
  Each question is followed by the reference statement: “Please compare to the last quarter and indicate a lower and an upper bound.” Experts provide lower and upper bound estimates on a scale of -100 (“worse”) to +100 (“better”) – see the picture below for illustration. In addition to the core questions, each survey wave may contain further questions.
  
  Note: The picture shows the first question including the answer slider as visible to the EES experts in the online questionnaire.
  
  3.   Aggregation
  From the experts’ answers to each survey question, we first construct the arithmetic mean for each country and second the arithmetic mean for each world region. We use 18 world regions within five continents, building on the UN geographical region definition. (Due to data constraints, we define all sub-regions within Oceania to be one region and combine the regions of Central America and the Caribbean into one single region.) We then calculate the arithmetic mean of the values from questions one and two to derive the overall economic policy assessment for each region. We proceed similarly for questions three and four to derive the political assessment.
  
  4.   Interpretation
  The evaluation and interpretation of each quarterly survey wave by the research team is published here.