It is important for decision-makers to have access to timely information on economic conditions. Official statistics are published with some delay, so it is important to be able to capture signals about economic developments in other ways. A common method is to use different types of survey data. Like many other central banks^[3] For example, Bank of Canada, Bank of England, Federal Reserve and Norges Bank. , the Riksbank therefore conducts a Business Survey with the aim of supplementing the official statistics with qualitative data collected directly from the business sector. The Business Survey provides the Riksbank with information on the current state of the economy via questions concerning companies' production, sales, employment and profitability. It also provides indications of the movement in the economy by highlighting the expectations of companies and how they plan to act based on these expectations. The results are made available one to two months before official statistics on, for example, GDP growth, which means that they can be used at an early stage to support the Riksbank's analyses.

To obtain an overall picture of the information provided by the companies, the Riksbank has produced an indicator of economic activity.^[4] The Riksbank has previously published an indicator of economic activity based on the Business Survey. It weighted eight questions using so-called Winkler weights, where the weight was based on how well each series could predict GDP growth. See Hokkanen, Melin & Nilsson (2012). It will be published in the Riksbank's Business Survey Report and will primarily serve as a summarising measure of the companies' responses. This Commentary presents an analysis that examines whether the Business Survey indicator can also be used as a measure for estimating actual developments in economic activity. The analysis covers how well the Business Survey indicator reflects GDP growth and how useful the indicator is as a predictor of GDP growth. In addition, the indicator is compared with other indicators that are based on survey data from the business sector. Unlike other company-oriented surveys, the sample for the Riksbank's survey is concentrated to a few companies that dominate their industries. It is therefore interesting to examine how the Business Survey indicator relates to other survey-based measures that have a much larger sample size. Such a comparison tells us something about the accuracy of the survey and also how reliable the Business Survey indicator is in relation to other available indicators.