This paper shows that long-term inflation expectations have become de-anchored from the ECB Governing Council's inflation aim. The long-term expectations in the ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters have not returned to the levels that prevailed before the 2013-14 period of disinflation, and their distribution is still skewed towards lower inflation levels. Moreover, long-term expectations have become sensitive to short-term ones and to negative inflation surprises. Forecasters who participated in most of the surveys are the most responsive to short-term developments in inflation.

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This paper illustrates the tools used at Banca d'Italia (Bd'I) to monitor the evolution of inflation expectations. The paper also surveys the analyses conducted at Bd'I to assess how inflation expectations affect agents' choices and the economy. The first part discusses the measures of inflation expectations derived from the prices of inflation-linked financial instruments and from surveys of professional forecasters. The second part focuses on the measures of households' and firms' inflation expectations collected by Bd'I, along with analyses presenting empirical evidence that expectations do indeed drive agents' economic choices. The last part analyses the overall effect of exogenous changes in inflation expectations on the real economy through the lens of the macroeconomic models used at Bd'I.

This paper summarises the findings of the Eurosystem's Expert Group on Inflation Expectations (EGIE), which was one of the 13 work streams conducting analysis that fed into the ECB's monetary policy strategy review. The EGIE was tasked with (i) reviewing the nature and behaviour of inflation expectations, with a focus on the degree of anchoring, and (ii) exploring the role that measures of expectations can play in forecasting inflation. While it is households' and firms' inflation expectations that ultimately matter in the expectations channel, data limitations have meant that in practice the focus of analysis has been on surveys of professional forecasters and on market-based indicators. Regarding the anchoring of inflation expectations, this paper considers a number of metrics: the level of inflation expectations, the responsiveness of longer-term inflation expectations to shorter-term developments, and the degree of uncertainty. Different metrics can provide conflicting signals about the scale and timing of potential unanchoring, which underscores the importance of considering all of them. Overall, however, these metrics suggest that in the period since the global financial and European debt crises, longer-term inflation expectations in the euro area have become less well anchored. Regarding the role measures of inflation expectations can play in forecasting inflation, this paper finds that they are indicative for future inflationary developments. When it comes to their predictive power, both market-based and survey-based measures are found to be more accurate than statistical benchmarks, but do not systematically outperform each other. Beyond their role as standalone forecasts, inflation expectations bring forecast gains when included in forecasting models and can also inform scenario and risk analysis in projection exercises performed using structural models. In terms of the implications for the ECB's economic and monetary analysis going forward, the work of the EGIE essentially highlights the need for (i) more data on households' and firms' inflation expectations, (ii) a comprehensive framework for assessing (un)anchoring and (iii) further considerations regarding the use of observed expectation measures in forecasting models.