The Consumer confidence index and short-term private consumption forecasting in Peru

The Consumer Confidence Index of APOYO Consultoría (INDICCA) is computed based on the responses to ten questions of a monthly survey in the city of Lima which aim to reflect the consumers’ spending intentions. We evaluate some sub-components of INDICCA in terms of their predictive and explanatory power of private consumption. In this process, we also evaluate the disaggregation on socioeconomic levels of this index, and a synthetic indicator of confidence based on dynamic factor models suggested by Jonsson and Lindén (2009) as an alternative way to combine the information contained in the sub-components of this index. We find that the explanatory and predictive power of private consumption models in Peru is enhanced when consumer confidence indices are included. However, this improvement is only marginal when other control variables such as employment or inflation are added. In particular, the optimal consumer confidence indicator is the synthetic indicator constructed with the dynamic factor model procedure. The results presented in this paper, although valid for some sub-components, are still inconclusive for the overall INDICCA.