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.

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Calculate the Business Confidence Index in Python

The Business Confidence Index is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it 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'])

Which returns:

  Brazil Canada Costa Rica
2022-09 100.196 100.381 101.157
2022-10 99.7735 99.9799 101.145
2022-11 99.4016 99.6322 101.141
2022-12 99.2565 99.3052 101.161
2023-01 99.2264 98.9732 101.222
2023-02 99.2644 98.6224 101.35
2023-03 99.3837 98.2617 101.553

Parameters

get_business_confidence_index accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Consumer Price Index Inflation Rate Consumer Confidence Index Composite Leading Indicator House Prices Rent Prices Share Prices Exchange Rates Producer Price Index Real Effective Exchange Rate Household Savings Rate Household Debt to Income Ratio

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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