Consumer confidence indices and short-term forecasting of consumption

Recently there has been growing interest in examining the potential short-term link between survey-based confidence indicators and real economic activity, notably for macroeconomic policy making. This paper builds on previous studies to establish whether there is a short-term predictive relationship between measures of consumer confidence and actual consumption, which could be used for forecasting, in a range of major industrial countries. It then extends such previous analyses by assessing whether this relation has changed over time, and whether we can attribute any time-varying relation to structural developments in the economy, such as financial deepening and the increasing role of house prices in determination of consumption.