KOF Economic Barometer Is Falling Mittwoch, 30. November 2016 - 09:03
30.11.2016 | Press release
In November 2016, the KOF Economic Barometer fell by 1.7 points (from revised 103.9 in October) to 102.2. The upward trend that could be observed since mid-2015 has thus not continued into the last month. Yet, with its level still slightly above the long-term average, it still indicates that the growth of the Swiss economy in the near future should remain close to its long-term average.
In November 2016, the KOF Economic Barometer, with a new reading of 102.2, continued slightly above its long-term average. The strongest negative impulses came from the hotel and catering industry and manufacturing. The only positive impacts worth mentioning originated in the financial sector and the international economy.
Within the manufacturing sector, the slightly deteriorated outlook manifested itself primarily in the paper, food and machine building industries. However, these negative tendencies were slowed down somewhat by an improved outlook in the wood-processing and timber industry.
The impaired sentiment in manufacturing as a whole is primarily a reflection of the more skeptical assessment of its competitiveness, the outlook for Swiss exports and the situation for intermediary inputs. Accordingly, the Swiss manufacturing industry continues to operate in a challenging environment.
KOF Economic Barometer and reference time series: annual update
In September 2016, the scheduled annual update of the KOF Economic Barometer took place. The annual update of the Barometer concerns the following stages: redefinition of the pool of indicators that enter the selection procedure, update of the reference time series, a new execution of the variable selection procedure and a procedure to estimate missing monthly values of quarterly variables. The updated reference series is the smoothed continuous growth rate of Swiss GDP according to the new System of National Accounts ESVG 2010, released at the end of August 2015, which takes into account the release of the previous year’s annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. As a result of the indicator variable selection procedure, the updated KOF Economic Barometer is now based on 272 indicators (instead of 238 as in the previous vintage) from a pool of more than 400 potential indicator series. They are combined using statistically determined weights.