Reserve Bank of NZ Statement: 19 September 2024 – We would like to thank the hundreds of businesses taking part in the development of the new Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey.
The survey is currently in its experimental stages, with regular publication expected to start in May 2025.
The new widespread survey will eventually include several hundred businesses from different sectors around the country, from small to large firms. It is separate from the existing Survey of Expectations including expert forecasters and economists, (Table M14, 1987 – onwards) which will continue.
Business Expectations Survey, Pilot 2:
We continued our development of Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey with a second pilot survey in July 2024. A public consultation on the survey was undertaken during March 2024 and a first Pilot conducted during April 2024.
Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey: Development update following second pilot outlines our lessons learnt from the latest testing activities and resulting design proposals.
We listened to feedback and made the following changes to the survey design for the second pilot:
We made the survey shorter and quicker for businesses to fill in.
Eight core questions covered respondents’ expectations for inflation, wages, and unemployment, at various time horizons.
We included primary industries (agriculture and mining) for the first-time in the survey.
A shorter questionnaire had a noticeable effect on the willingness of respondents to repeat the survey. Having a panel of respondents who complete the survey every quarter is an important aspect of the survey design, so we plan to continue with the smaller number of core questions.
We will continue to include primary industries for the next pilot. The response rates for small and medium-sized businesses in primary industries were somewhat lower than other strata. We will continue to monitor the quality impact of inclusion before making a final decision.
Please note that the pilot survey results are experimental data.
Continuation of parallel testing before full survey implementation during 2025
We plan to run two more pilots (in October 2024 and January 2025) before expecting to commence regular publication of the April 2025 survey in May 2025.
We still have more to learn about respondents’ participation over multiple quarters. Further testing will allow us to continue to build the sample size, create timeseries, and finalise weighting methodology.
Background information
In June 2024 we outlined the lessons learnt from our public consultation and first pilot survey (conducted during April 2024), and described the resulting design proposal to be further tested with a second pilot during July 2024 – see Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey: Design proposals following consultation and pilot https://govt.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bd316aa7ee4f5679c56377819&id=e281f5eaa7&e=f3c68946f8
In March 2024 we conducted a public consultation on our design proposals – see Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey: Consultation Paper. https://govt.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bd316aa7ee4f5679c56377819&id=a87bf8948c&e=f3c68946f8
We announced our investigations to enhance our surveying of expectations in August 2023 – see Stats Alert: Survey of expectations: Change of research provider and Investigations to enhance the survey. https://govt.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=bd316aa7ee4f5679c56377819&id=a9d07de068&e=f3c68946f8
