A monthly indicator of the business climate in the french service industry : applications of benchmarking techniques in official statistics

Since September 2004, Insee has published the results of its business survey in the services sector on a monthly basis together with a synthetic indicator. This indicator is extracted from both monthly and quarterly balances of opinion derived from the survey. The methodological framework is provided by dynamic factor analysis. Indeed, it is flexible enough to deal with both multi frequency series and changes in frequencies. This model has a state-space representation and can be estimated by a Kalman filter. Alternative models have been explored and yield very similar indexes, which emphasizes the robustness of the Insee indicator.This index can be obtained at a disaggregated level and provides an economic outlook of the services sector. Thus, it confirms the resurgence of activity in the services sector in France since mid-2003. More precisely, the activity appeared to be rather bumpy in 2004 and tends to decelerate in the beginning of 2005.