KOF Economic Barometer Rises Markedly Dienstag, 28. Februar 2017 - 09:08
28.02.2017 | Press release
In February 2017, the KOF Economic Barometer rose by 5.2 points to a new reading of 107.2. This pronounced upturn to a level clearly above its long-term average indicates that in the near future the Swiss economy should grow at rates above average.
In February 2017, the KOF Economic Barometer climbed from 102.0 in January (revised up from 101.7) by 5.2 points to a level of 107.2, which is markedly above its long-term average and as high as it had last stood in the end of 2013. The Swiss franc appreciation shock from early 2015 hence by now appears to have been largely overcome.
The strongest positive contributions to this result come from the manufacturing industry, followed with a clear gap by the hospitality industry. Slightly positive signals stem from the financial sector, the exporting industry and the construction sector, whilst the indicators relating to domestic private consumption have practically remained unchanged compared to January.
Within the manufacturing industry, the improved total outlook was primarily driven by the paper, textile, electrical and machine-building industries, and the architects are more optimistic than previously, too. The remaining industry branches, on the other hand, recorded hardly any change.
The markedly improved sentiment in manufacturing as a whole is primarily a reflection of the more positive assessment of incoming orders, followed by the production and employment outlook as well as by the profit situation.
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.