The ifo Business Climate Index for Germany: A Vintage Dataset

Klaus Wohlrabe () and Stefan Sauer

No 12665, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The ifo Business Climate Index for Germany is one of the most widely used leading indicators for the German economy. This paper introduces a new vintage dataset that contains all originally published time series of the ifo Business Climate Index and its components since January 2004. The dataset covers eight sectors - including the aggregate indicators for Overall Economy and Industry and Trade as well as six sectoral indicators - each with three time series for business climate, current business situation, and business expectations. It documents the historical evolution of the index across publication vintages and captures revisions arising from seasonal adjustment and from methodological changes, such as the transition to the X-13ARIMA-SEATS seasonal adjustment method in 2015 and the inclusion of the service sector in 2018. A revision analysis covering the period from April 2018 onward shows that first-release values are highly reliable: mean revisions are close to zero across all series, and the directional signal of the month-on-month change is confirmed by subsequent vintages in more than nine out of ten months for the headline indicator. The dataset is publicly available at https://www.ifo.de/ifo-zeitreihen and enables a wide range of further research, including real-time forecasting exercises, turning-point analyses, and studies of financial market reactions to initial data releases.

Keywords: ifo Business Survey; ifo Business Climate Index; real-time dataset; revision analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 C80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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