Luigi Federico Signorini: The use of surveys for monetary and economic policy

Welcome address by Mr Luigi Federico Signorini, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the conference on the use of surveys for monetary and economic policy, jointly organised by the Bank of Italy, the European Money and Finance Forum (SUERF), the European Central Bank and the European Investment Bank, Rome, 26 April 2023.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

I am pleased to open the conference on the use of surveys for monetary and economic policy, jointly organised by the Bank of Italy, the European Money and Finance Forum (SUERF), the European Central Bank and the European Investment Bank. Let me first thank the organisers for putting together such a good programme, with top-level speakers from policy institutions and academia.

Survey data have played and continue to play a key role in shaping our understanding of the economy and our ability to design effective policies.

The Bank of Italy has a long tradition in this area. Following some even earlier experiments, we launched our Survey of Household Income and Wealth in the early 1960s. While there have been many changes since those early days, our SHIW is still very much alive; it has one of the longest continuous histories in this field. Soon afterwards, we started our annual Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, also still running. Over time, we have further expanded our toolbox, with higher-frequency surveys of firms and households, banks and real-estate agents.

We have always prized our ability to collect pieces of data through surveys that are not provided by general statistics, but are meaningful for economic analysis in our fields of action. When I say 'the ability to collect', I do not only refer to legal freedom (or authority), or to practical means, which are just prerequisites. Even before Zvi Griliches's famous 1985 critique1 – that while economists were increasingly using and even designing surveys, they were broadly uninterested in, and unaware of, the crucial steps of data collection and quality assessment – our surveys had always entailed, first, the close involvement of economic analysts at all stages and second, strong investment in statistical human capital, that is, both theoretical and practical expertise in statistics