KOF Business Situation: Swiss Economy Still on the Ascent

The business situation in the various sectors followed different trends. Project engineering offices and financial and insurance service providers reported very little change in their favourable business situation. The rising trend reported by the manufacturing industry in the preceding months continued in August. By contrast, momentum slowed down slightly in the construction industry where the business situation clouded over to some degree. Retail also failed to emulate the previous month’s business situation, with the indicator pointing slightly downward again. Wholesalers, the hotel and catering companies and the other service providers were last surveyed in July. At the time, the business situation of the wholesalers and the hotel and catering companies continued to improve, while the other service providers reported a very slight slowdown.  

Broken down according to FSO regions, the business situation changed relatively little in the different regions. Espace Mittelland reported a slight further recovery and has been on the ascent since spring. In August, the business situation also improved to some extent in Central Switzerland. Little change was reported in the Zurich region, Ticino, the Lake Geneva region and Eastern Switzerland. In North-West Switzerland, the situation slowed down very slightly.

Explanation of graphs

Graph G 4 presents the KOF business situation across all sectors covered by the survey. The business situation in sectors which are surveyed on a quarterly basis is kept constant during the intervening months.

Graph G 5 presents the business situation in the main regions according to the Federal Statistics Office (FSO). The regions are coloured according to business situation. The arrows in the regions indicate the change in the business situation compared to the previous month. An upward-point-ing arrow, for instance, indicates that the situation has improved over the previous month.

The KOF business situation is based on over 4,500 reports by Swiss companies. Every month, businesses are sur-veyed in the following sectors: industry, retail trade, con-struction and project engineering as well as financial and insurance services. Businesses in the hotel and catering sector, wholesalers and the other service providers are surveyed in the first month of every quarter. Among other questions, the businesses are asked to assess their cur-rent business situation. They may rate their situation as ‘good’, ‘satisfactory’ or ‘bad’. The balance of the current business situation is the percentage difference between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responses.