00000nam 2200000za 4500 9.834975 CaOODSP 20221107150546 cr ||||||||||| 170407s2017 oncd ob f000 0 eng d CaOODSP eng eng fre n-cn--- FB3-6/2017-5E-PDF Pichette, Lise. Assessing the Business Outlook Survey indicator using real-time data [electronic resource] / by Lise Pichette and Marie-Noëlle Robitaille, Canadian Economic Analysis Department. [Ottawa] : Bank of Canada, 2017. iii, 20 p. : col. charts Bank of Canada staff discussion paper, 1914-0568 ; 2017-5 "April 2017." Includes bibliographical references (p. 13-14). "Every quarter, the Bank of Canada conducts quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada, referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS). A principal-component analysis conducted by Pichette and Rennison (2011) led to the development of the BOS indicator, which summarizes survey results and is used by the Bank as a gauge of overall business sentiment. In this paper, we examine whether data vintages matter when assessing the predictive content of the BOS indicator and individual BOS questions and whether the BOS is a better indicator of revised or unrevised macroeconomic data. As an indicator of business sentiment in the context of monetary policy, the reliability of the BOS is essential, and it is crucial to understand whether the signals it sends are best interpreted for early-released or revised data. For this purpose, we use different methods of forecasting that take into account the real-time perspective of the data. Results from the different methods show that the BOS content is informative regardless of data revisions. However, in real time, the BOS indicator and individual BOS questions are found to produce better nowcasts of first-released data or partially revised data than of latest-available data. This is particularly important in the case of growth in real business investment. In fact, because revisions to real business investment are more volatile than revisions to real gross domestic product (GDP), the choice of data vintages when assessing the ability of the BOS to forecast growth appears to be more important for real business investment than for real GDP"--Abstract, p. ii. Includes abstract in French. gccst Businesses gccst Surveys gccst Indicators Robitaille, Marie-Noëlle. Bank of Canada. Staff discussion paper (Bank of Canada) 2017-5 (CaOODSP)9.806273 PDF 564 KB https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/banque-bank-canada/FB3-6-2017-5-eng.pdf