The Belgian industrial confidence indicator: leading indicator of economic activity in the euro area?

The international press has recently reported on the widely-held view in the financial markets that the movement of the Belgian industrial confidence indicator might precede the euro area business cycles. The initial purpose of this paper is to assess whether this market perception is more than a simple optical illusion, resulting from the inspection of graphical representations of the data. For that, explicitly formalised methods are used to identify the timing of turning points in the industrial confidence indicators for Belgium and for the euro area, and the statistical significance of the... Mehr ...