The question either the managers’ expectations describe and predict main economic tendency in Ukraine is important question for the economic policy in the country. The information about business’s perceptions of their environment became of key importance in the times of change in economic tendencies. The international financial crisis of 2008 is just such period in economic development of the world. The crisis and next deceleration of world economy have to lead a sharp recession of Ukrainian economy in 2009. In Ukraine the Quarterly Enterprise Survey is the oldest survey belongs to the group of Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) which has been originally launched in 1996.
In this paper we continue the comparison the results of the BTS in manufacturing with quantitative data in Ukraine. The focus of the paper is on looking answer on the question: what business confidence trend to tell us in situation of the recession. The first results of the study have been presented in CIRET/KOF/GKI-Workshop 2009.
We have started from the description of the dynamic of BTS variables before deterioration of macroeconomic indicators and during the recession in 2009, beginning of 2010. Then the relationship of the indicators received from BTS to published statistical macroeconomic indicators is analyzed. Comparison is done for period of observations from 1998 to 2009 with special attention on 2008-2009 crisis periods. It is important to mentioned that new recalculated series of macroeconomic statistics has become public available since beginning of 2010 and it has impact to comparison. The set of BTS indicators includes the both single variables and composite indicator. Moreover we try to study the role played by the single elements of balances, namely share of negative and positive answers (“bad” and “good” for variable of assessments of indicator and “decrease” and “increase” for ex-past and ex-ante changes), because sometimes the share percents are more consistent to the actual trend than balance.
