This paper assesses different ways of converting qualitative data obtained in surveys into quantitative indices for a number of economic variables. The research reported here focuses on the main UK employers' business survey for manufacturing - the CBI industrial trends survey. Six response...

In this paper we propose a new approach based on principal components analysis to test for the number of common stochastic trends driving the non-stationary series in a panel data set. This test has the advantage that it is also consistent when there is a mixture of I(0) and I(1) series, making...