Since 2007, economists at the Riksbank have been meeting with company representatives to discuss their company's current situation and how the situation is expected to change going forward. The advantage of gathering information through dialogue is that the interviewer can ask follow-up questions on the basis of these assessments. The respondent's qualitative descriptions are complemented by quantitative answers to a set of core questions to be answered during the interview. In this way, the Business Survey provides an in-depth picture of the current situation in the business sector while collecting measurable data that shows how the situation changes over time.^[5] The respondents’ quantitative responses are coded as “1” for “better” or “increase”, “0” for “unchanged” or “normal”, and “-1” for “worse” or “decrease”. The net figures for each question and survey round are weighted by company size (number of employees) and form a point in each question’s time series.

During a survey round, the Riksbank meets between 40 and 50 of the larger companies from the most important sectors of the Swedish economy. Despite a somewhat limited sample size, previous evaluations of the Business Survey have shown that the time series of quantitative responses are well aligned with official statistics on each question.^[6] Frohm & Tibblin (2015) This can be explained by the fact that the Swedish business sector is dominated by a relatively small number of players, which means that a smaller sample can cover a large part of the business sector.