Rationality of inflationary expectations in the European Economic Communities Countries

Empirical assessment of rationality of inflationary expectations has attracted considerable interest. However no conclusive evidence has emerged in favour nor against the hypothesis of rationality. In this paper a new set of data is used to test the weak-form rationality of survey based expectations for a fairly large group of countries with very different inflationary experiences. The empirical tests carried out in the paper show that two necessary conditions of weak-form, linear rationality are met for four of the seven countries in the sample: France, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, which happen to be the countries with relatively stable and low rates of inflation. This conditions are not, however, met in the case of Italy and Denmark, with the U.K. being a marginal case. The interpretation of these results is left open in the paper.