Overall business confidence declined in March. At 93.3, the Istat gauge is down from 94.7 in February, with manufacturing confidence falling from 86.9 to 86.0.

Meanwhile, retail trade confidence and service climate declined from 104.0 to 103.9 and from 97.4 to 94.5 respectively. The service climate fell due to strong pessimism about the current business trend and order book volume. Construction confidence grew from 103.4 to 104.6 with expectations for future employment growing.

Consumer confidence fell from 98.8 in February to 95.0, due to declines in all components, including private climate, current and expected economic situation.

In summary, the report potentially points to decline across business, 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.