A comparison on the company level of manufacturing business sentiment survey data and realized turnover : discussion paper 05007

Using a classification method developed in this paper, the quality of qualitative survey data of the manufacturing industry at micro-economic level is investigated. For single companies, recent opinions on recent production developments are compared to quantitative results of industrial turnover. The results show that 57.6% of the analyzed companies give useful qualitative answers for calculating meaningful balance statistics such as producers’ confidence. The level of agreement between quantitative and qualitative data for companies with seasonal patterns in turnover on average is 10.6%-points higher than for companies without seasonal patterns.