New proposals for the quantification of qualitative survey data

In this paper we deal with several issues related to the quantification of business surveys. In particular, we propose and compare new ways of scoring the ordinal responses concerning the qualitative assessment of the state of the economy, such as the spectral envelope and cumulative logit unobserved components models, and investigate the nature of seasonality in the series. We conclude with an evaluation of the type of business cycle fluctuations that is captured by the qualitative surveys.