Last month the FOI was invited to attend the Joint EC-OECD Workshop and the Internal EU Workshop on Developments in Business and Consumer Surveys held in Brussels between November 14 and 16.

FOI executive Kevin Caruana, who manages the FOI Industry Survey under the Joint Harmonised Programme of EU Business and Consumer Surveys, represented the FOI at these two workshops.

The Joint European Commission-OECD Workshop discussed work carried out in the framework of the OECD task forces on the priority tasks identified at a similar workshop held in Brussels in November 2003 and the subsequent development work defined at the 2004 OECD workshop in Warsaw.

The issues covered included the improvement of response rates and the minimisation of respondent load; the harmonisation of survey operation and technical design; recent developments of the OECD Business Tendency and Consumer Opinion Surveys Portal; the use of business and consumer opinion survey data; recent developments in the seasonal adjustment of business tendency and consumer opinion data; and several studies on other topics.

The Internal EC workshop reported on recent developments in the framework of the Joint Harmonised EU Programme of Business and Consumer Surveys. The main areas of discussion throughout this workshop were the overhaul and simplification of the investment and retail trade surveys, respectively; the possibilities of extending the services survey sector coverage; the support of the European Commission in national publications on surveys; seasonal adjustment methods; the differences in metadata for the data published by national institutes; the experiment of posing quantitative questions on price perceptions and expectations in the consumer survey; and the construction of confidence indicators with static and dynamic factor models.