ifo World Economic Survey (WES)

Information on the World Economic Survey

• Information

  • The aim of the World Economic Survey (WES) was to provide of the current economic situation, as well as economic trends in over 100 key advanced, emerging or developing economies by polling more than 1,000 economic experts. Unlike official statistics, which are largely based on quantitative information, WES focused on qualitative information by asking economists for their assessment of selected key economic indicators for the present and for the short-term future.

    While official statistics on an international basis are only available after a certain time lag, WES results stood out by virtue of the fact that they are rapid, up-to-date and comparable from country to country. The approach of this expert survey was to monitor the general economic situation and expected economic developments of a whole economy by means of sector-unspecific, qualitative expert statements.

• Methodology of the World Economic Survey

  • The qualitative questions in the World Economic Survey had three possible categories: “good / better / higher” (+) for a positive assessment resp. improvement, “satisfactory / about the same / no change” (=) for a neutral assessment, and “bad / worse / lower” (−) for a negative assessment resp. deterioration; The individual replies were combined for each country without weighting as an arithmetic mean of all survey responses in the respective country. Thus, for the time t for each qualitative question and for each country i the respective responses (+), (=) and (−) were calculated. The balance B_(i,t) was the difference between (+)- and (−)-shares:

    

    whereas ni,t reflected the number of respondents in country i in time t. While aggregating the results to groups of countries (e.g. euro area, EU28), the weights factors were calculated using the gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity of each country:

    

    The database used for the gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity was the World Economic Outlook of the International Monetary Fund. In order to achieve a uniform database over all countries, country weights were based on data of the previous two years (t-2J).