Business Confidence in Eurozone

Euro area Business Confidence is part of the European Commission's business surveys, which also provide the Economic Sentiment Indicator and confidence indices for industry, construction, retail trade and services. Indices are calculated for each country, for the euro area and for the European Union as a whole.

It is based on qualitative surveys of a broad panel of firms across the various sectors. From their responses on their situation and expectations, the confidence indices are compiled as net balances, and include supplementary information such as capacity utilisation in industry.

It gauges firms' perception of how the euro area economy is faring and anticipates their spending and investment decisions ahead of the later hard data. It is therefore regarded as a leading indicator of the bloc's business cycle, followed by markets and by the ECB.

As it is released after the individual member states' confidence indices, it rarely brings surprising information, since much of its content has already been previewed. Being a sentiment survey, it also captures perceptions rather than activity actually carried out.