Overall business confidence declined in February. At 94.8, the Istat gauge was down from 95.7 in January. Manufacturing confidence rose slightly from 86.8 to 87.0, an improvement from the previous month.

Meantime, both retail trade confidence and service climate declined from 106.3 to 104.0 and from 99.0 to 97.5 respectively. Service climate especially, fell due to strong pessimism about the current business trend and the order book volume. Construction confidence, also weakened from 104.2 to 103.4 with expectations for future employment declining slightly.

Consumer confidence grew to from 98.2 in January to 98.8, mainly due to improvements in some components such as private climate, current and expected economic situation. Offsetting the decline in economic climate confidence.

In summary, the report potentially points to mild growth in manufacturing and consumer activity this month.

The Italian statistics office (Istat) conducts business and consumer confidence surveys over the first fifteen and ten working days of each reference month respectively. These provide information about current and expected developments in key sector variables. The largely qualitative results are synthesized for each survey into a single number that provides an overall measure of sentiment. Business confidence reflects the combined results of separate surveys covering manufacturing, retail, construction and services.

If investors want to know how the business or consumer sectors are performing as they evaluate their investment decisions, they can find timely and in depth information in the latest Istat surveys. Although short-term swings can be erratic, changes in trends in confidence can contain very useful information about a sector’s underlying health well in advance of the release of the official data. Moreover, by including some forward-looking components (e.g. manufacturing orders or consumer buying intentions) the Istat surveys can also provide a potential insight into prospective developments.