The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the "death of the cycle". Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

In this paper we propose a relatively simple procedure to predict Euro-zone industrial production using mostly data derived from the business surveys of the three major economies within the European Monetary Union (France, Germany, and Italy). The basic idea is that of estimating business...

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...

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...

The quarterly survey of investment in industry, conducted by the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) is a prime source of information concerning short-term evolutions in productive investment, making it possible to estimate these evolutions at an early stage and with...

The answers to qualitative questions put to economic operators can be integrated in standard macro-economic analysis by using a "quantification" procedure chosen among the probabilistic approach, the regression methods or the latent factor approach. The first one is the most commonly used. It is...