The Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad’s (IIM-A's) latest Business Inflation Expectations Survey (BIES) report, which seeks to provide ways to examine the amount of slack in the economy by polling business leaders from around 1,100 companies, has said that there was “further hardening of cost pressures”, with over 40% of the firms in December 2020 perceiving “significant (over 6%) cost increase – up from 30% reported in November 2020.”