Business Dialogue Survey: Central Bank of Malta modernises data accessibility

In its task to maintain price stability, the Central Bank of Malta contributes to the monetary policy decisions affecting the euro area. To do this effectively, the Bank regularly monitors and analyses economic and financial developments in Malta.

This involves the collection of various datasets, including the Business Dialogue survey. The Bank is now launching its first dashboard to increase the accessibility of this survey.

This dashboard is available here, or through the Bank’s website.

The Business Dialogue survey involves the bank’s economists regularly keeping contact with top-level representatives of corporations and institutions.

The interview format of this survey allows business representatives to raise topics relevant for their organisation. This survey gives a real-time glance at business conditions and additional data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

This data will be more accessible than ever with the Business Dialogue dashboard. This will allow users to instantly gain insights on business conditions, expectations, selling and input prices, employment, and investment.

The dashboard’s landing page contains information about the survey, the latest quarter’s key figures, and the downloadable aggregated survey data. The other pages detail the survey’s key themes within which one can focus on specific sectors and/or periods.

The first survey theme page describes business conditions. The dashboard allows users to immediately access the proportion of respondents that have seen their business conditions improve, worsen, or remain stable. The dashboard also allows for further disaggregation, such as results by sector, thus offering the user an intuitive way to understand which sectors are mostly contributing to the aggregate business conditions enjoyed by the economy.

For further analysis one can compare reported conditions to the expectations reported by businesses in the previous quarter. Apart from tracking discrepancies in expectations, one can also gauge business’s economic prospects across time from Q4 2020.

This dashboard is one of several steps to increase the accessibility of the Bank’s underutilised datasets which are relevant to the wider business and academic communities. To be notified on the Central Bank’s activities in this effort follow us on social media or visit our website.