Increasing demand of analysts, decision-makers, market agents and the broad public for timely economic information and the ability of these indicators to hint business cycle turning points, have made them very common and useful. The peculiarity of these indicators is that they reveal information on the tendency of various economy indicators, based on qualitative opinions of businesses and consumers. The Bank of Albania has been working for several years to construct these indicators, based on the results from large-scale surveys conducted with 720 businesses and 1200 consumers. The cooperation with global leaders in this area has been very efficient. Experts from the German Institute of Economic Studies have supported the process of methodological and economic analysis of business confidence indicators. While working for this project, Bank of Albania’s experts have studied and applied important aspects of contemporary methodologies followed by the OECD countries and by the European Commission. Until coming to the decision to publish them, researches and tests have been constantly carried out on the developments, suggested by these indicators and later on verified by the statistics of the INSTAT. The compliance degree of the tendencies from both sources is assessed as statistically significant, thus making them useful. Various methodologies and empirical findings have been introduced in technical round tables, and in working papers and articles compiled by the Bank’s experts. For more than four years, the results revealed by these indicators have been more and more taken into consideration by Bank of Albania’s decision-making, thus contributing to the building of inflation expectations indicator.
They provide preliminary information on expected producer price performance, an important link for the price-setting process in the economy. Consumption and savings tendencies of the population are revealed through relevant indicators. In conclusion, the economic sentiment indicator combines the businesses’ and consumers’ opinions, giving hints of the economic prospects in the short run. I would like to speak at length about the importance and informational utility of the confidence and the foregoing indicators. But, I would rather emphasize the respect the users should pay to such indicators, opting for being oriented to the large information flow through them. I regard this only as the beginning of a comprehensible and transparent cooperation. To this end, other special meetings and activities will follow, enriching various groups of interest with knowledge on business confidence or tendency indicators. I have confidence in the added values they will bring to users’ analyses. But, I advise and require of users, researchers, economic journalists of written and electronic media, students and pupils, businesses and consumers and the broad public, to rightly understand these indicators, before using them. These tendencies have resulted from businesses’ and consumers’ opinions and do not constitute the official stance of the Bank of Albania. The Bank of Albania has built them on the basis of an advanced methodology. It has made use of the information obtained from interviewed businesses and consumers and it has confidence in their qualitative assessments and in those indicators. Their publication enhances the public transparency and makes the decision-making process more comprehensible.