Business Tendency Surveys in the System of Modern Statistics

The article examines the opportunities of business tendency surveys of enterprises in condition of official statistics imperfection considering the specifics of the development of Russian economy in recent years. Based on the 25-year experience of the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy in the field of conducting and developing monthly surveys of industrial enterprises, it is shown that this data source is able to supplement the results of traditional statistics, and in the case of 2008-2009 crises, and 2015-2016 - significantly surpass them. So, the crisis of 2008-2009 was registered by IEP surveys a month before its official recognition, and especially in 2015-2016 - the absence of a crisis recession in demand, output and employment, with confident control of enterprises for finished products - were already shown in the first quarter of 2015. The flexible organization of the business surveys of the IEP allows one to directly measure many of the actual phenomena that are relevant at the present stage, but which are not available to traditional statistics. In years 2012-2017, the results of IEP surveys showed a low demand for devaluation of the ruble as a protective measure for the domestic producer in the context of a critical dependence of the industry on imported equipment, components and raw materials. For this reason, the strengthening of the ruble in February 2015 was considered by Russian enterprises to be the most important anti-crisis measure and theassessment of the actual impact of the ruble devaluation on demand, costs and investments in 2015-2017 were always negative.