Comparison of Consumer Sentiment Indices in Poland Using Frequency Domain Analysis

There is a variety of consumer surveys in Poland and currently five institutions are conducting consumer tendency surveys. These are Research Institute for Economic Development (RIED) that has been conducting monthly since 1990, IPSOS which has been conducting monthly survey since December 1991, CSU that has been conducting monthly survey since 2004 (quarterly survey since the second quarter of 1997), PENTOR which has been conducting monthly survey since January 2000 and GfK Polonia that has been conducting monthly survey since May 2001. In this sense, Poland is probably the only country in the world with so many consumer sentiment surveys. However, one should be skeptical on the issue whether each index has the information content for the future path of economic growth. Dudek (2008) examines the RIED data in order to test whether this data forecast the real private consumption expenditures in Poland in the short term and concludes in its favor. We would like to take his study further by examining the relationship between each of these consumer confidence measures and industrial production in Poland as a proxy for economic growth. The empirical analysis includes the recently developed test of Breitung and Candelon (2006) which enhances the time domain Granger-causality analysis to the frequency domain. Our preliminary results show that some of the consumer sentiment surveys perform better than others in predicting the future path of the economy.