Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The business tendency survey indicators cover a standard set of indicators for four economic sectors: manufacturing, construction, retail trade and other services. This includes an indicator of overall business conditions or business confidence in each sector. The consumer opinion survey indicators cover a restricted set of indicators on consumer confidence, expected economic situation and price expectations.   Business and consumer opinion (tendency) surveys provide qualitative information that has proved useful for monitoring the current economic situation. Typically they are based on a sample of enterprises or households and respondents are asked about their assessments of the current situation and expectations for the immediate future. For enterprise surveys this concerns topics such as production, orders, stocks etc. and in the case of consumer surveys their intentions concerning major purposes, economic situation now compared with the recent past and expectations for the immediate future. Many survey series provide advance warning of turning points in aggregate economic activity as measured by GDP or industrial production. Such series are known as leading indicators in cyclical analysis. These types of survey series are widely used as component series in composite leading indicators.   The main characteristic of these types of surveys is that instead of asking for exact figures, they usually ask for the direction of change e.g. a question on tendency by reference to a “normal” state, e.g. of production level. Possible answers are generally of the three point scale type e.g. up/same/down or above normal/normal/below normal for enterprise surveys and of the five point scale type e.g. increase sharply/increase slightly/remain the same/fall slightly/fall sharply for consumer surveys. In presenting the results as a time series, only the balance is shown. That is “same” or “normal” answers are ignored and the balance is obtained by taking the difference between percentages of respondents giving favourable and unfavourable answers.   Virtually all business tendency and consumer opinion survey data are presented as time series of balances in this dataset, either in raw or seasonally adjusted form. Very few series are presented as indices, and where these exist they have generally been converted from underlying balances by countries before submitting the data to the OECD.

Main Economic Indicators (MEI) provides a wide range of indicators on recent economic developments in the 35 OECD member countries and 15 non-member countries. The indicators published in MEI have been prepared by national statistical agencies primarily to meet the requirements of users within their own country. In most instances, the indicators are compiled in accordance with international statistical guidelines and recommendations. However, national practices may depart from these guidelines, and these departures may impact on comparability between countries.

The 'Production and Sales (MEI)' dataset is a dataset containing predominantly monthly statistics, and associated statistical methodological information, for the 34 OECD member countries and for selected other economies. The Production and Sales dataset contains industrial statistics on four separate subjects: Production; Sales; Orders; and Work started. The data series presented within these subjects have been chosen as the most relevant industrial statistics for which comparable data across countries is available. For Production, data comprise Indices of industrial production (IIP) for total industry, manufacturing, energy and crude petroleum; and further disaggregation of manufacturing production for intermediate goods and for investment goods and crude steel. For others, they comprise retail trade and registration of passenger cars; and permits issued and work started for dwellings. Considerable effort has been made to ensure that the data are internationally comparable across all countries presented, coverage for as many countries as possible, and that all the subjects have reasonable length of time-series to assist analysis. Most data are available monthly and are presented as an index (where the year 2010 is the base year) or as a level depending on which measure is seen as the most appropriate and/or useful in the economic analysis context. Due to differences in statistical or economic environment at country level, however, availability of data varies from one country to another.

The OECD cross-section sectoral indicators measure regulatory conditions in the professional services and retail distribution sectors. The retail indicators cover barriers to entry, operational restrictions, and price controls. These indicators were updated and revised; they are now estimated for 34 OECD countries for the years 1998, 2003, around 2008 and 2013 and for another set of non-OECD countries for 2013. Users of the data must be aware that they may no longer fully reflect the current situation in fast reforming countries. Not all data are available for all countries for all years.