Business tendency surveys provide very useful indicators of trends within an economy. The information is available well before the official statistics, such as GDP growth, and provides insights into business dynamics that cannot be found elsewhere.
For 70 years the Bureau for Economic Research at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University has been conducting business tendency surveys. Indeed, South Africa remains one of the few countries where these surveys are conducted by a non-state agency.
The surveys cover a range of questions, tracking everything from activity to demand, selling prices to inventories, investment and also the constraints holding back investment. But the most important question is very simple: are you satisfied with prevailing business conditions? Respondents can only respond with a yes or a no. There is no scale, no maybe, no but. It is a pure gut feeling. This is the only true measure of business sentiment in South Africa.
