Note on the Participation of Estudio Bein & Asoc. In the Survey of Market Expectations -REM- of the BCRA
For the Consultants, Foundations and Universities that we have participated since the creation of REM in 2004, the publication of the Top 5 (which included the first hits for each variable surveyed) was an effective incentive that resulted in a high level of participation. However, the initial objective of the survey, which followed the guidelines of other central banks such as the Focus survey in Brazil, consisted in having permanent information to analyze deviations and / or changes in the expectations of economic agents regarding macroeconomics in general and inflation in particular for the design of monetary policy, was distorted from the intervention in the INDEC initiated at the beginning of 2007.
The incentive to appear in the rankings and to lead them began to generate the unwanted situation in which the REM consensus on inflation began to gradually become a consensus that aimed to replicate expectations about the possible results of the INDEC CPI and not the evolution of the prices of the economy (which is the relevant variable for eventual adjustments in monetary policy). This generated a strong divergence between the results of the REM and the monthly projections that the respondents of the survey delivered in journalistic, business and / or academic consultations. Without going any further, today the inflation expectations for the year amount, according to the EMR, to 6.7% yoy. 15.1% projected by the survey carried out by Latin Focus, which asks what “real” inflation is.
Additionally, in the last few months, there has been growing evidence that the methodological differences and the results that are delivered in terms of inflation in the INDEC have been extended to other variables such as the Product, industrial production, unemployment and other indicators that represent estimates. , and they are not variables that arise from registers such as collection, monetary aggregates or the external trade surplus.
In this way, many of the projections that the participants load week by week in the REM have become a questionable exercise of interpretation and / or guesswork about the future delivery of information of the Institute, regardless of the evolution of the macroeconomic scenario, which transits by other lanes.
In our case, after having maintained a clear leadership position in the REM rankings since its inception in 2005, the incentive of a competition that is not fought in the field of good professional practice has lost all significance. As a result, from this date we will continue to provide the BCRA with our best estimates of all the economic and financial variables surveyed by the REM only on the basis of our own indicators, and not of the projections on the future publications of the Institute. Obviously this situation is only a second better, since we believe that no private consultant has sufficient technical capacity or structure to replace the INDEC. While statistics should continue to be a public good provided by the State, and Consultants,
Buenos Aires, July 20, 2009
