• Sentiment Surveys in Portugal – Description and Empirical Analysis

    Lígia Maria Nunes, António Jorge Silva, André Cardoso Dias

    Banco de Portugal, Lisboa, Portugal

    Abstract:

    Sentiment surveys are a powerful tool to capture economic agents’ expectations and activities, which makes them particularly useful for policy makers in interpreting and analysing economic conditions, especially since the global financial crisis, often labelled as a “confidence crisis”.

    This paper empirically assesses the role of confidence in explaining private consumption and analyses to what extent the Portuguese consumer confidence index can bring additional information beyond variables which are usually found to have some power in explaining the real expenditure of households. When relevant, we draw some comparisons of this phenomena in the euro area through similar studies previously conducted.

    Keywords: statistical surveys, consumer confidence, economic expectations.

    Pages: 137 – 144 | Full PDF Paper