ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment

The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment is published monthly by the Centre for European Economic Research, known by its German abbreviation ZEW, and measures the economic expectations of institutional investors and analysts in Germany. Since 1991 the underlying ZEW Financial Market Survey has interviewed up to three hundred experts from banks, insurance companies and corporate financial departments about their six month outlook for the economy, inflation, interest rates, stock markets and exchange rates. The index itself is a diffusion measure, calculated as the difference between the share of experts who are optimistic and the share who are pessimistic, producing a single number that runs from negative one hundred to positive one hundred, with readings above zero indicating overall optimism and readings below zero indicating overall pessimism.