Conferences

Some of the most valuable surveys conducted in order to obtain information about economic situation are business surveys. In qualitative business surveys, also known as tendency surveys, respondents are asked to specify direction of changes recently observed and expected in the future. Survey questions typically focus on such economic variables as general business conditions, prices, unemployment, and production; in most cases, answers are limited to options “increase/improvement”, “no change”, “decrease/deterioration”. Qualitative business surveys, although do not provide as many possibilities of formal analysis as quantitative business surveys, are often regarded as more reliable because respondents are more likely to correctly identify direction of changes than to provide a precise point assessment.

Expectations concerning key economic variables constitute a particularly interesting field of analysis as they certainly influence decisions undertaken by managers – among them selection of investment and production levels. Since the assumption of rationality of economic agents forms the basis of the standard neoclassical economic theory, question of whether expectations of enterprises are indeed formed rationally deserves careful attention.

As in almost every survey, in qualitative business tendency surveys the problem of nonresponse appears. It has been observed that the nonresponse rates are much higher for questions about expectations than analogous ones about realizations. In light of these facts, we propose to analyse selected properties of expectations expressed in business tendency surveys taking into account various nonresponse mechanisms.

The empirical part of the paper is based on business tendency surveys conducted by the Research Institute for Economic Development (RIED) of the Warsaw School of Economics.