ectoral Survey-based Confidence Indicators for Europe

In this paper we analyze a novel dataset of Business and Consumer Surveys, using dynamic
factor techniques, to produce composite coincident indices (CCIs) at the sectoral
level for the European countries and for Europe as a whole. Few CCIs are available
for Europe compared to the US, and most of them use macroeconomic variables and
focus on aggregate activity. However, there are often delays in the release of macroeconomic
data, later revisions, and differences in the definition of the variables across
countries, while the surveys are timely available, not subject to revision, and fully comparable
across countries. Moreover, there are substantial discrepancies in activity at
the sectoral level, which justifies the interest in a sectoral disaggregation. Compared
to the Confidence Indicators produced by the European Commission, which are based
on a simple average of the aggregate survey answers, we show that factor based CCIs,
using survey answers at a more disaggregate level, produce higher correlation with the
reference series for the majority of sectors and countries.