At its peak, the UK government was paying the wages of around a quarter of the workforce (9 million people) and is still doing so for around 4 million workers. Judging the true “employment status” of these furloughed workers, in particular whether they are actively seeking work, is difficult to judge. It is also difficult to gauge how many of these furloughed workers will return to their jobs once the furlough scheme ends. That leaves the current unemployment rate, the likely future unemployment rate and the equilibrium unemployment rate (taking into account the natural frictions associated with people moving job) all highly uncertain at present. This means measures of labour market slack in the economy are also highly uncertain. The same is true, for many of the same reasons, of measures of spare capacity within firms. 12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  12  With quantities uncertain, one indirect measure of slack comes from looking at the prices of labour, goods and services. These, too, have faced measurement problems and have been distorted by sharp shifts in the composition of employment and spending. 13 Nonetheless, most measures of underlying inflation and costs have been surprisingly resilient over the past year, given the scale of the contraction in activity. For  example, core CPI inflation rates have fallen by only 0.2 percentage points over the past year, while private sector average weekly earnings growth has been roughly unchanged.

They provide preliminary information on expected producer price performance, an important link for the price-setting process in the economy. Consumption and savings tendencies of the population are revealed through relevant indicators. In conclusion, the economic sentiment indicator combines the businesses’ and consumers’ opinions, giving hints of the economic prospects in the short run. I would like to speak at length about the importance and informational utility of the confidence and the foregoing indicators. But, I would rather emphasize the respect the users should pay to such indicators, opting for being oriented to the large information flow through them. I regard this only as the beginning of a comprehensible and transparent cooperation. To this end, other special meetings and activities will follow, enriching various groups of interest with knowledge on business confidence or tendency indicators. I have confidence in the added values they will bring to users’ analyses. But, I advise and require of users, researchers, economic journalists of written and electronic media, students and pupils, businesses and consumers and the broad public, to rightly understand these indicators, before using them. These tendencies have resulted from businesses’ and consumers’ opinions and do not constitute the official stance of the Bank of Albania. The Bank of Albania has built them on the basis of an advanced methodology. It has made use of the information obtained from interviewed businesses and consumers and it has confidence in their qualitative assessments and in those indicators. Their publication enhances the public transparency and makes the decision-making process more comprehensible.