Confiance et activité économique : analyse d’impact sur l’économie canadienne
Since the beginning of 2022, both consumer and business confidence indices have recorded sharp, rapid declines in both Canada and the United States. Overall, economic agents in both Canada and the U.S. seem pessimistic about future economic conditions. Here, the authors examine the causal aspect of the correlation between confidence and economic activity. Using econometric estimates based on the vector autoregressive models (VARs) method, they assess the impact of shocks to consumer and business confidence on several aggregates measuring Canadian economic activity. Their results suggest that a sudden rise (fall) in confidence is likely to trigger an economic acceleration (slowdown) in Canada. The impacts of specifically Canadian confidence shocks are quantitatively more important, hence the importance of an analysis focusing on Canadian measures of confidence.
