PARIS (Reuters) – Business leaders in France do not seem to be expecting a spiral of rising prices and wages for the time being even if their inflation expectations are high, shows a quarterly survey by the Banque de France published Thursday.
Last November, the Banque de France launched a survey of 1,700 business leaders on the trends they observe in terms of price changes in order to be less dependent on the reactions of the financial markets in terms of anticipation of the inflation.
Publishing the results of this survey for the first time, the institute headed by François Villeroy de Galhau points out that the median one-year inflation expectations of these business leaders surveyed at the end of May and the beginning of June is 5.0. %, against 3.0% last November.
Over a three to five-year horizon, this inflation expectation is however reduced to 3.0% and around 35% of the business leaders surveyed even see it at around 2.0%, i.e. the medium-term objective of the European Central Bank.
The median expectation of wage growth one year ahead stands at 3.0% now, against 2.4% in November.
“These expectations on wages remain lower than those on general inflation over the same one-year horizon and do not seem to indicate the triggering of a price-wage loop”, declares the Banque de France.
The latter specifies that its survey was conducted before the announcement on June 9 by the European Central Bank of a normalization of its monetary policy, which should, according to the Banque de France, “contribute to gradually reanchoring inflation expectations “.
(Report Leigh Thomas, French version Bertrand Boucey, edited by Sophie Louet)
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