KOF Economic Barometer: Recovery tendency confirmed
In September, the KOF Economic Barometer continues to rise, albeit only very slightly. However, this month’s small increase nevertheless confirms the much more pronounced rise in the previous month. The Swiss economy is slowly working its way out of the trough.
The KOF Economic Barometer rises by 0.5 points. It now stands at 105.5 (revised from 105.0 in August). In August, the Economic Barometer had climbed by a revised 3.7 points. In September, almost all indicator bundles for the economic sectors point to a more favourable outlook than before. Above all, the indicators for the manufacturing industry and, to a lesser extent, those for the financial and insurance services, the construction industry and the other services. In the hospitality industry, the rather above-average prospects remain almost unchanged. On the demand side, the indicators for consumer demand are also almost unchanged, pointing to a rather above-average further development. By contrast, the indicators for future foreign demand are weakening.
In the producing industries (manufacturing and construction), in particular the indicators for the general business situation, export opportunities and intermediate input purchases are increasingly pointing to an improvement. By contrast, those for production activity and employment development suggest a less favourable further development than in the previous month.
Within the manufacturing, the outlook for chemical and pharmaceutical companies as well as for the metal industry is improving. By contrast, it is weakening for the electrical industry as well as the textile and clothing segment.
KOF Economic Barometer and Reference Series: Annual Update
The annual 2024 revision took place in September. These updates always comprise the following steps: a redefinition of the pool of indicators that enter the selection procedure, an update of the reference time series and a renewed execution of the automated variable selection procedure. For further background information, we refer to a separate document.
The updated pool of indicators now consists of 553 economic time series. The updated reference series is the smoothed growth rate of Swiss GDP distributed across the three months of a quarter from 2014 until and including 2023, based on the official quarterly real GDP statistics, adjusted for the effects of major international sporting events, as released by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) in early September 2024. SECO, in turn takes the release of the previous year’s annual GDP data published by the SFSO into account.
The 2023 vintage of the KOF Economic Barometer (published until August 2024) comprised 324 indicator variables. The current 2024 vintage, which is now replacing the 2023 vintage, consists of 360 indicator variables. Compared to the previous vintage, 74 indicators are new and 38 dropped out of the set of selected indicators. The Barometer is the rescaled weighted average of the selected indicators, where the weights correspond to the
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