?
The HSE ESI and short-term cycles in the Russian Economy
This paper investigates the ability of Russian business tendency surveys to identify cycli-cal turning points. Presently, when the Russian economy is characterized by concentrating un-certainty, growing gap in opinions and actions of entrepreneurs and decision-makers, im-portance of such qualitative surveys as information resource significantly increased. National business surveys program were launched in 1993; since 2009, regular large-scale sectoral sur-veys are carried out by the Higher School of Economics in co-operation with the Federal State Statistics Service. The study is focused on the issue: whether the aggregate dynamics of busi-ness confidence assessments in Russia conforms to the real economic situation? We have tried to determine to what extent business surveys data are sensitive to phase alternating in cyclical development of the national economy. For this purpose, we have constructed an integrated al-gorithm to build specific indicators, which cover as far as possible all information contained in the sectoral business surveys results. Identification of turning points in these indicators dynam-ics allows us to track the possible ‘averaged’ chronology of the cyclical phase alternation. In addition, we have evaluated retrospective turning points in GDP growth according to extracted cyclical profile in dynamics of the composite Economic Sentiment Indicator