ABSTRACT
Investment business surveys in industry ask firm managers to give evaluations of their investment : they are supposed to give investment forecasts and realisations on a period of three consecutive years. This survey system thus gives the opportunity to measure how firms evaluate and re-evaluate their investment. The evolution of the answers of the firms could be significant: at least in two occasions (in January 1995 and January 1998) firms had given a very different figure than three months earlier (in October survey). This study wants to investigate how firms are forming their investment forecasts and how they are re-evaluating them. We estimate simple econometric relations on the 1991-1997 period on a panel of industrial enterprises. The first section wants to investigate the way firms are evaluating the investment levels collected in the business surveys. The second tries to find factors that could lead to a change in the enterprise forecast.
