ABSTRACT
The Ifo Business Survey - like many related business surveys in other countries - was primarily designed to signal changes in advance in nonmonetary areas such as monthly industrial production, monthly new orders in manufacturing, monthly export trends, or quarterly GDP. A number of studies confirm that business surveys have an outstanding performance in meeting these tasks.1 An illustration of the predictive power of indicators based on business survey results is given in Figure 29.1. The Ifo Business Survey has also been very successful in forecasting short-term changes in sales prices as is demonstrated in Figure 29.2.
