A New Approach to Probabilistic Surveys of Professional Forecasters and Its Application in the Monetary Policy Context

Abstract

In this paper we present the NBP Survey of Professional Forecasters introduced in 2011 by the National Bank of Poland. It is a new survey that allows analysis of macroeconomic forecasts of professional economists, including their probabilistic forecasts of CPI inflation, GDP growth and the NBP reference rate. In the paper we discuss in detail survey methodology, whose some elements are novel. It refers especially to the construction of probabilistic survey questions. Instead of declaring probabilities that in a certain horizon a given variable will be in pre-defined intervals, NBP SPF experts declare median and the limits of a 90-percent probability range between the 5th and 95th percentile of their subjective probability distributions. To present the benefits from the applied design of the NBP SPF, we describe the first results obtained from the NBP SPF.