They have also documented the substantial heterogeneity in the formation and updating of expectations across demographic groups. To facilitate further research, we make the survey data available in the Center for Microeconomic Data section of our website. Each month we also illustrate the trends in our expectations series through easy-to-use, interactive charts. Further, a number of our Liberty Street Economics blog posts describe the data and the analysis we have conducted. We do this because we want researchers, policymakers, commentators and the general public to understand the data and to follow our updates. Let me now describe our Survey of Consumer Expectations in more detail. 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The Survey of Consumer Expectations Following extensive design and testing, we launched the Survey of Consumer Expectations in June 2013. The survey has a number of innovative and unique features, three of which I would like to highlight today. First and foremost, as I mentioned earlier, it collects households’ subjective expectations and intentions on a wide range of economic outcomes and behaviors. In addition to short- and medium-term inflation expectations, it collects data on households’ expectations regarding the housing, labor and credit markets, as well as households’ financial situations and a host of other macroeconomic variables of interest. For example, the survey elicits beliefs about future wage growth, house price appreciation, job search and labor market transitions, households’ spending and income growth, and credit applications.

With interest rates set at low levels, financial repression curtailed domestic resource mobilization thus making the economy dependent on foreign savings as reflected in huge foreign debt at the time.   Low interest rates provided an incentive for fiscal indiscipline as the government obtained almost zero-interest-denominated resources to finance its deficit. In the state-owned banking sector, poor lending decisions (often politically influenced) and low repayment rates ultimately led to large budgetary bailouts.   In the face of high inflation rates and fixed nominal interest rate, real interest rates remained negative for the larger part of the period, leading to low domestic savings and other forms of capital flight. A growing awareness of these economic costs led to financial “liberalization” as the dominant policy paradigm. Zambia embraced financial-sector liberalization policy prescription and embarked on a fairly ambitious reform program. This program entailed a variety of measures including the liberalization of interest rates; the establishing of the freedom and the procedures for entry into and orderly exit from the financial sector; the reduction of commercial banks’ reserves and liquidity requirements; the elimination of credit allocation directives; the elimination of preferential credit at concessional interest rates; the liberalization of the exchange rate; and the removal of controls on the current and capital accounts of the balance of payments. Due to liberalisation, the banking environment in Zambia has become competitive as banks compete for the share of the customer deposits and good quality credit. Prior to 2005, the banking industry’s balance sheet was largely concentrated in Government Securities.