The report summarizes the present survey practices in Europe and some countries on other continents. The study was launched on behalf of the European Commission and the OECD in April-July 2006. The aim of the project was to identify the state of present survey practices of the institutions that...

Interest rates play a key role in free market economies. According to the Taylor rule, shortterm interest rates depend on deviations of the current inflation rate from a normative value and of the output gap. Given the difficulty of observing the output gap, we postulate that alternative...