IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/boe/qbullt/0025.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What can we learn from surveys of business expectations?

Author

Listed:

Abstract

The recent financial crisis was accompanied by an unprecedented deterioration in businesses’ expectations for future economic activity. This article examines the strength of the signal that measures of these expectations have provided for output growth in the past. Recessions have typically been preceded by large declines in surveys of business expectations. But these measures have, on occasions, given false signals of recessions, falling sharply with little discernable response in economic activity. And small movements in these survey measures tend to contain little information. The article considers techniques that may help to distinguish whether large declines in measured expectations are meaningful or not. But it concludes that this must ultimately be left to judgement. Consequently, while measures of business expectations are useful economic indicators, they must be interpreted with care.

Suggested Citation

  • Wheeler, Tracy, 2010. "What can we learn from surveys of business expectations?," Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of England, vol. 50(3), pages 190-198.
    • Handle: RePEc:boe:qbullt:0025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2010/what-can-we-learn-from-surveys-of-business-expectations.pdf?la=en&hash=4B54BB7D1CA349A08E609995BCE974BE88CB4878
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lui, Silvia & Mitchell, James & Weale, Martin, 2011. "The utility of expectational data: Firm-level evidence using matched qualitative-quantitative UK surveys," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 1128-1146, October.
    2. Lui, Silvia & Mitchell, James & Weale, Martin, 2011. "The utility of expectational data: Firm-level evidence using matched qualitative-quantitative UK surveys," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 1128-1146, October.
    3. Tatiana Cesaroni & Stefano Iezzi, 2017. "The Predictive Content of Business Survey Indicators: Evidence from SIGE," Journal of Business Cycle Research, Springer;Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys (CIRET), vol. 13(1), pages 75-104, May.
    4. Lise Pichette, 2012. "Extracting Information from the Business Outlook Survey Using Statistical Approaches," Discussion Papers 12-8, Bank of Canada.
    5. Stratford, Kate, 2013. "Nowcasting world GDP and trade using global indicators," Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of England, vol. 53(3), pages 233-242.
    6. Jin Cong Wang & Laura Berger-Thomson, 2015. "Consumer Sentiment Surveys," RBA Bulletin (Print copy discontinued), Reserve Bank of Australia, pages 1-8, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:boe:qbullt:0025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Publications Group (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/boegvuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.