Las encuestas de opinión empresarial como instrumento de control y predicción de los precios industriales

Abstract

Abstract. Since the end of the 40s, business surveys have become an essential tool for economic agents and decision-makers to track the evolution of a set of variables related with the manufacturing activity. In order to make the qualitative data coming from tendency surveys more easily interpretable they need to be transformed so that they can also be analyzed with standard statistical techniques. A method for quantifying qualitative survey data is proposed so that it allows to relax some of the assumptions of the model. The method is applied to price expectations data from the Encuesta de Coyuntura Industrial (ECI) of the Cámara de Comercio de Barcelona (COCINB) to forecast the evolution of the manufacturing price index (IPRI) in Catalonia. Key words. Business surveys, qualitative data, quantification methods, manufacturing prices and inflation expectations.