THE Business Confidence Indexl (ICE) dropped 2.5 points in January compared to December 2021, to 91.6 points, informed this Tuesday, the 1st, the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV).
It is the lowest level of the indicator since April 2021, when the country was at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, breaking records of deaths from Covid-19.
In quarterly moving averages, the indicator had a decline of 3.0 points in January. It was the fourth consecutive month of decline in this average. According to FGV, the ICE has already accumulated 10.9 points since September last year.
ICE gathers confidence indicators produced by Industry, Services, Trade and Construction surveys.
The calculation takes into account the weights proportional to the participation in the economy of the investigated sectors, based on information extracted from the annual structural surveys of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). According to FGV, the objective is for the ICE to allow a more consistent assessment of the pace of economic activity.
The downward movement that started last September was initiated by the industry, but now, the service sector is suffering the most, whose confidence was the one that fell the most in January, “under the influence of the worsening of the pandemic situation with the arrival of the Ômicron variant”. to Brazil”, according to FGV.
“In this segment, there is a more expressive drop in the indices that measure the perception of companies regarding the current situation compared to the indices that measure expectations, a typical trend of the shocks caused by the waves of covid-19. This result is worrying as the segments most dependent on face-to-face consumption employ a lot and were only now managing to return to confidence levels comparable to those of the pre-pandemic period”, says FGV, in a note.
As well as the sectoral confidence indicators that comprise it, the ICE is made up of two main components. The Present Business Situation Index (ISA-E) dropped 4.5 points to 91.3 points. The Expectations Index (EI-E) dropped 3.0 points, in the fourth consecutive drop, to 91.4 points, the lowest level since March 2021, when it stood at 85.2 points.
The ICE collection gathered information from 3,755 companies in the four sectors between January 1st and 26th.
source: Estadão Conteudo
Source: CNN Brasil
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