MNI PODCAST: ECB Wage Tracker Gains In Importance

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• The ECB's wage tracker is helping officials determine trends in the absence of other timely data, says the head of the ECB’s Prices and Costs Division Sarah Holton
• The tracker, published on the Wednesdays after Governing Council meetings but available to policymakers as they set rates, covers almost half of employees in the top five euro area economies plus Austria and Greece.
• The wage tracker enabled the ECB to correctly anticipate that negotiated wage growth would gain strength in 2024 before hard data were available. 

Listen to the full podcast here.