Things had already been moving in the right direction in the recent years: for a number of years our annual written special surveys, making use of our CTS contacts, had been published in the Economic Bulletin, exploring the views of the non-financial corporate sector on various topics such as trade patterns and global value chains (2016), structural reform needs (2017), digitalisation (2018), price setting behaviour (2019), and lastly the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (2021).
Likewise, in line with the new transparency guidelines, the annual meetings of the ECB Governing Council with selected high-level representatives of our surveyed companies has been part of the public calendar as the Non-Financial Business Sector Dialogue (NFBD).
So far, however, outside observers would not know how these contacts with stakeholders of the real economy were established in the first place. This was now cleared up with the publication of an article and a box in the Economic Bulletin Issue 1/2021:
every quarter a small team of ECB staff is contacting a small sample of large non-financial corporations active across the Euro area in order to gain insights in to the current state of the business cycle in their sector, i.e. in the last quarter, their expectations for the current quarter and what factors are behind these developments. This is an extremely interesting project, which also forces interviewers to familiarise themselves with sector-topical issues, to be well prepared for the short phone interviews with our busy counterparts, often high-level executives such as the CFO.
I am personally involved in the teams dealing with two sectors:
- transport and logistics services, which includes operators of infrastructure such as ports, airports and motorways, and service providers such as airlines, shipping companies and providers of supply-chain logistics solutions
- intermediate goods manufacturing, which includes producers of basic metals, chemicals, packaging solutions and more elaborate components further used in other industries.
I am very happy that this work, which provides important information feeding in to the ECB’s monetary policy, is finally publicly acknowledged. For more information, read the article and box on the ECB website HERE!
