Konjunkturmonitor

Reference period. Where the monitor refers to a “usual” level, it means the average of 2015 to 2019: the last five full years before the pandemic, after the euro debt crisis and before the 2022 energy price shock. The exception is the business cycle clock, which measures the distance from the long-term average of 2005 to 2019, because the phases of a business cycle can only be identified over several cycles.

Legends. Where a chart shows several series, clicking a legend entry hides or shows that series; a double-click shows it alone, another one shows all.

Colours and symbols. ▲ up, ▼ down, ● unchanged at the precision shown. Red is reserved for warning signals: an increase where it is unfavourable (inflation, unemployment, insolvencies) and thresholds. Blue, purple and green only distinguish series and carry no judgement. In maps and heat tables, orange stands for an increase and blue for a decrease.

All figures come from open, official sources: Deutsche Bundesbank (seasonally adjusted series of the Federal Statistical Office and the Federal Employment Agency), Eurostat (national accounts, consumer prices, EU business and consumer surveys) and the statistics of the Federal Employment Agency. Forecasts come from the linked publications. The texts are the author’s own explanations, not an official assessment. The German version is the reference; this English version is a translation.

Earlier data vintages. Every Monday the complete data and the code version are stored as an archive, so every earlier version of the page can be recomputed.

Method sheets. Every chart has a one-page sheet (in German) with data, sources, calculations and method: all method sheets.

Licence. Text and own charts are licensed under CC BY 4.0; attribution: Wolf-Fabian Hungerland, Konjunkturmonitor. The data are subject to the licences of the sources named with each chart. Exception: charts using data from the Global Macro Database, including their downloads, are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, as the database requires.

The monitor only shows data that are freely available and may be redistributed. Some widely used indicators are therefore missing:

• Licence required: ifo business climate and ifo export expectations (ifo Institut), ZEW economic sentiment (ZEW), purchasing managers’ indices (S&P Global), GfK consumer climate (NIM), HDE consumer barometer (HDE), IAB labour market barometer (IAB), IWH insolvency trend (IWH), futures prices for electricity and gas (EEX), container throughput index (RWI/ISL). The supply chain index GSCPI of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is missing for now because its terms of use still need to be checked; likewise daily gas consumption by households and industry (Trading Hub Europe). Business and consumer sentiment is covered instead by the freely available surveys of the European Commission.
• No retrievable time series: underemployment of the Federal Employment Agency (only in monthly reports), finances and contribution rates of social insurance (projections by the funds), obstacles to investment from business surveys, decomposition of potential output into labour, capital and productivity (not available as a series in AMECO), contributions of industries to new orders (weights not published).