Modelling Short-term Interest Rates in the Euro Area Using Business Survey Data

Interest rates play a key role in free market economies. According to the Taylor rule, shortterm interest rates depend on deviations of the current inflation rate from a normative value and of the output gap. Given the difficulty of observing the output gap, we postulate that alternative indicators of pressure on capacity should be monitored, especially those obtained from business surveys. Primarily, our work compares those empirically observed capacity utilization figures (CU) with the difference between actual and potential GDP, and tries to assess monetary policy on the basis of these indicators. The analysis of monetary policy is done in the first case by using a simple single equation framework and in a next step by using a more advanced vector autoregressive model. Given the fact that the survey measure of output gap captures only manufacturing and thus omits the important service sector which has a high share in value added we constructed a more comprehensive measure of capacity utilization (CU*). The new indicator is based on CU in manufacturing industry and on the confidence indicator for services...