Efforts to capture feelings

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Economic thinking, economic analysis, and the evaluation of public policies cannot ignore what households or businesses feel. On the one hand, because this will influence their behavior and decisions, and it is therefore economically rational to be concerned with feelings as a determinant of activity. On the other hand, very fundamentally, because the ultimate objective of economic policy is not statistics but the well-being of citizens and voters.

Public statisticians, those at INSEE, ministerial statistical services, and the Banque de France, make enormous efforts to report on what is perceived, as is the case in most countries. They often rely on systems that have been the subject of international reflection. It is a constant concern for public statistics to gain public trust; when perception deviates from objective ebay database measurement, statisticians must question and seek to understand the gap between the two.

Historically, the first examples probably relate to business surveys . For decades, INSEE and the Banque de France have asked samples of companies to give their feelings on the evolution of their activity, their workforce, their prices, etc. (Bjai, 2024). These are qualitative questions that are converted by statisticians into balances of opinion published each month. These surveys have a fairly strong predictive power on short-term economic developments, over a horizon of a few months. This is why they are widely used by INSEE to establish the economic forecasts in its business reports.