The economic outlook improved slightly in November, bolstered by and improved demand outlook, as the Economic Barometer rose to 101.7 from a revised 101.5 (101.3) in October. That's the best result since 103.3 in February, the month before US tariffs were imposed.

While foreign demand and private consumption indicators are favorable, there are still pain points in financial and insurance services as well as the construction sector.

Perhaps with the agreement reached between the US and Switzerland to lower tariffs from 39 percent to 15 percent, there was a positive outlook among respondents for the export sector.

The heavily export-oriented Swiss economy was buffeted by the 39 percent tariffs which hit the chemical, pharmaceutical, and watch industries particularly hard. With US imposed duties now in-lint with the European Union, there is cause for cautious optimism that the fourth quarter could be better than the third.

The KOF Economic Indicator is a composite leading indicator that aims to identify shifts in the Swiss business cycle around three months ahead of the actual event and, until the start of 2014, was based on twenty-five different economic indicators. The old version of the KOF Economic Indicator used the previous year's GDP growth rate published by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) as a yardstick. The revised measure still incorporates SECO data; however, KOF has changed over to month-on-month changes in GDP which are generated via statistical methods. This reference series is not about exact GDP figures but about the direction and strength of the economic trend. The new objective of the Barometer is the same as the old objective: achieving maximum possible accuracy in predicting the Swiss business cycle.

The indicator measures overall economic activity through a qualitative business survey about developments in the recent past, the current situation and expectations for the next three to six months. Getting an accurate handle on where the economy is headed is inevitably a vital element in all investment decisions and the new measure uses some 219 variables in order to do just that. The set of variables will be reviewed every autumn.

Survey questions relate to production, orders and stocks of finished goods. The KOF Swiss Economic Institute publishes this indicator monthly.