An inquiry based means for the quantification of qualitative inflation expectations of the Ifo World Economic Survey

The expectations of ca. 1,100 experts polled in the quarterly Ifo World Economic Survey (WES) on important macroeconomic factors in more than 90 countries are published as balances that only give information on whether the survey participants, on average, expect the queried variables to rise, to remain unchanged or to fall. By means of a new method, Ifo researchers have succeeded in quantifying these so-called qualitative expectations and have computed concrete values for the expected value of the variables.