Business Confidence Index
This business confidence indicator provides information on future developments, based upon opinion surveys on developments in production, orders and stocks of finished goods in the industry sector. It can be used to monitor output growth and to anticipate turning points in economic activity.
Numbers above 100 suggest an increased confidence in near future business performance, and numbers below 100 indicate pessimism towards future performance.
See definition: https://data.oecd.org/leadind/business-confidence-index-bci.htm
Also known as: BCI, business sentiment.
Business Confidence Index in Python or via the MCP
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_business_confidence_index as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2022-09-01', end_date='2023-03-01')
economics.get_business_confidence_index(countries=['Brazil', 'Canada', 'Costa Rica'])
Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:
How did business confidence in Brazil, Canada and Costa Rica develop each month from September 2022 to March 2023?
Which returns:
| Brazil | Canada | Costa Rica | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-09 | 100.2 | 100.557 | 100.704 |
| 2022-10 | 99.8479 | 100.162 | 100.693 |
| 2022-11 | 99.5281 | 99.8368 | 100.689 |
| 2022-12 | 99.3767 | 99.541 | 100.708 |
| 2023-01 | 99.3373 | 99.2389 | 100.763 |
| 2023-02 | 99.3642 | 98.909 | 100.879 |
| 2023-03 | 99.4444 | 98.5588 | 101.063 |
Parameters
get_business_confidence_index accepts the following parameters.
| Parameter | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
countries | list[str] | str | None | The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None. | ["United States", "Germany"] |
rolling | int | The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None. | 4 |
trailing | int | The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None. | 4 |
growth | bool | Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False. | True |
lag | int | The number of periods to lag the data by. Defaults to 1. | 4 |
standardize | bool | Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False. | True |
rounding | int | None | The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None. | 2 |