The Use of Qualitative Business Tendency

in Germany Investment in equipment and machinery is a very important component of GDP. In this paper we examine whether data from business tendency sur-veys are useful for a timely assessment of current investment behavior. In addition we investigate whether the survey results are helpful for forecasting investment growth in the short run. The first question is addressed with the help of spectral analysis. To study the forecast ability we estimate linear autoregressive and additive autoregressive models. The forecasting perfor-mance is assessed through filtered residuals. The analyses show that the business survey is indeed a useful tool for assessing investment in equipment and machinery