Friday, October 5, 2012: 4:35 PM
There is a variety of consumer surveys in Poland and currently there are four institutions which are conducting consumer tendency surveys. These are Research Institute for Economic Development (RIED) that has been conducting quarterly survey 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) 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 set 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 the remaining consumer confidence measures and industrial production and retail sales in Poland as a proxy for economic growth. The empirical analysis includes the recently developed test of Rua (2010) which enhances the comovement analysis in time domain and frequency domain to wavelet measure. Our preliminary results show that some of the consumer sentiment surveys perform better than others in predicting the future path of the economy.
Keywords: Consumer Sentiment, Industrial Production, Retail Sales, Wavelet Comovement Analysis.