New Zealand Statistical Association 2024 Conference

Alan Bentley

Reserve Bank of New Zealand

Introducing the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s new business expectations survey

This is joint work with Matt Haigh

As inflation targeting pioneers, New Zealand has conducted quarterly surveying of expectations for more than three decades, eliciting the views of households, forecasters, economists, and industry leaders. Te Pūtea Matua Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is now investing in a new broad-industry Business Expectations Survey, Tara-ā-Umanga, to better understand the economic outlook including the inflation expectations of key decision makers.

Salient design features include a stratified random sample, drawn from Stats NZ’s Statistical Business Register, of all businesses operating in New Zealand with 6 or more employees. Fifteen design strata will provide domain coverage for 5 industries (Primary, Manufacturing, Construction, Retail, Other) by 3 employment-sizes strata (6-19, 20-99, 100+ employees). A nine-quarter rotating panel design will increase the precision of estimates of temporal changes and allow some longitudinal analysis, whilst having regard for equitable respondent burden and potential for panel conditioning. Web questionnaire content will include three core questions, asked every quarter, alongside occasional and rotating questions.

We present results from a pilot survey designed to test recruitment strategies and other operational procedures, as well as providing initial estimates of response rates, and population parameters (such as mean and median expectations) for each design strata. We also summarise findings from a public consultation on the survey design and learnings from cognitive testing of questions.