The Service Sentiment Indicator : a Business Climate Indicator for the German Business- Related Services Sector

No other area of the German economy has developed so emphatically in the past ten years as that of business-related services. Regardless their growing importance, business-related services still play only a minor role in official statistics. Above all, official statistics do not provide up-to-date information on the state of the business cycle of this sector. In a situation where such quantitative information is lacking, data obtained from business surveys give important guidelines to the state of this part of the economy. In this paper we show how a relieble compounded business climate indicator for busniness-related services can be constructed from both business survey and national accounts data