The Malta Federation of Industry has won a contract to conduct the industry survey under the joint harmonised EU programme of business and consumer surveys, on behalf of the European Commission.

This EU programme gathers information on the economies of the member states so as to be able to compare their business cycles for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) management purposes.

It uses business and consumer surveys to complement quantitative statistical surveys.

The survey will establish trends in the outlook of manufacturing industry in Malta. It consists of a few, easy to answer questions that will be sent on a monthly basis to a selected sample of industries operating in Malta.

The FOI will be giving respondents a wide choice of options in how to reply to the survey. They can log onto the newly set up business surveys section of its website, www.foi.org.mt, or they can send their response by e-mail, fax or post.

The FOI has long experience in conducting industry surveys. Besides carrying out various ad hoc surveys on different subjects from time to time, it has been conducting a regular six-monthly survey, the Industry Trends Survey, since 1982.

Now that it is conducting the EU survey the FOI intends to eventually phase out its own.

Kevin Caruana, a graduate in economics from the University of Malta, joined the FOI last February to focus primarily on the survey. He has just returned from a two-week traineeship in the European Commission on the subject.

The federation took this initiative in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The first survey will be launched in the first week of May. Replies will be collected up to the middle of each month after which they will be collated and forwarded to the Commission.

The FOI guarantees that all data collected will be treated confidentially and will be accessible only to a selected number of FOI and PricewaterhouseCoopers executives who will be responsible for conducting the survey.

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