Methodology

Consumer Confidence Index

1) ¿How is your economic situation with respect to one year ago: is it better, it remains the same or is it worse?

2) ¿What do you think will happen to your economic situation within the next year: will it improve, will it be the same or will it be worse?

Macroeconomic Situation

3) ¿How do you think it will be the country’s economic situation a year from now: better, the same or worse?

4) ¿ How do you think it will be the country’s economic situation three years from now: better, the same or worse?

Parchase of Durable Goods and Real Estate

Options: Yes, No, Don’t know.

6) ¿Do you think is a good moment to do important purchases such as  cars, or houses?

Opciones: Yes, No, Don’t know.

Index construction

For each question, a positive answer is assigned to the options better/yes, according to the question, and the options worse/no will be considered negative answers. The index corresponding to each of the questions is based on the proportion of positive answers (p) and negative answers (n) over the total number of people surveyed. According to the formula included below, we can see that if all the answers to a specific question were positive the value of the index would be 100, while in the opposite case the value would be 0.

The (partial) index linked to each question is calculated as

PartialIndexCIF = 50 * {p - n + 1}

where

p= proportion of positive answers over the number of people surveyed
n= proportion of negative answers over the number of people surveyed

Once calculated the PartialIndexCIF, the average between both indexes of each of the groups (personal economic situation, macroeconomic situation and purchase of durable goods and real estate) is calculated , and finally the ICC_CIF is obtained by computing the average value of each group.