Central bank inflation forecasts tended to be more accurate over the past 12 months, marking a sign of improvement after the global inflation surge sent many forecasts awry.

Data from the Economics Benchmarks 2023 shows a median forecast error at the quarterly horizon of 0.61 percentage points for headline inflation. Respondents were asked to give the mean absolute forecast error, averaged across the past 12 months. Twenty-four central banks supplied data on inflation errors.

The 2023 figure is a