Data from the Decision Maker Panel are discussed in almost every meeting of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC)…. They have proved especially valuable in helping us understand the implications of some of the significant economic events that have hit the UK economy over recent years. Most recently, they have been used as a key indicator to assess the prospects for wage and price growth in the economy. For my part, I study each one with great interest.
Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England
17 February 2025
Essential economics survey marks its one-hundredth edition
The Decision Maker Panel (DMP) has run its one-hundredth survey of UK CEOs since it was established in 2016 to provide economic policy-makers with timely quantitative evidence on current and expected future business conditions.
Run by the Bank of England in partnership with a team of academics, including King’s Business School’s Professor Paul Mizen, the ESRC-funded survey collects detailed information on the economic conditions facing businesses and their expectations about how conditions will develop.
In a letter marking the 100th edition of the survey and thanking CEOs for their participation, the Bank of England Governor explained how information from the survey informed the Bank’s decision making:
The DMP surveys executives across a representative sample of firms with 10 or more employees from all sectors of the economy and for the last two years has gathered an average 2,500 responses each month.
The survey asks firms about recent developments and their year-ahead expectations for their sales, employment and investments, as well as for the selling price of their products and services. Their growth expectations are given as five possible scenarios (most optimistic to most pessimistic), and firms are asked to assign probabilities to each scenario. This makes it possible to calculate businesses’ expectations as an average, as well as to measure uncertainty from the distribution of firm responses. Measuring firm-level uncertainty in this way is an important methodological contribution of the DMP.
In addition, the survey has been used to explain a number of policy decisions, and has been cited in Monetary Policy Committee meetings, the quarterly Monetary Policy Report, letters from the Governor to the Chancellor, in evidence to the Treasury Committee in Parliament and in speeches. Deputy Governor Clare Lombardelli’s also cited the Decision Maker Panel in her speech at King’s Business School’s recent Watchers’ Conference.. Further information on the survey and how the data can be accessed is detailed in a recent methodology paper.
Find out more
More information about the Decision Maker Panel can be found on its website.
In this story
Professor in Economics