Wobbly Polls on Business Confidence... and the latest political poll

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Once again we are being tempted to read too much into a poll. The latest Wellington Regional Chambers of Commerce and Business Central survey of business confidence found "Businesses' confidence continues to fluctuate. The positive result from the December survey followed a net negative 12 per cent result from the survey in September... More businesses expect the economy to worsen than expect it to improve in the next 12 months."


But it's just as likely that it's the poll results that fluctuated, and the differences are due to the differing representativeness of each sample survey and the size of their margins of error.

But then, as in other business polls, the general view differed from what business people said about their own business prospects.

"While business-owners foresee  a hard time for the country's economy (the general view influenced by political opinions and what the media is reporting), the majority remained confident about their own prospects ... A net 38 per cent expected an uplift in their own prospects in the coming 12 months, though that was down from a net 47 per cent in December."

I wonder why pollsters continue to ask and report on general views about the economy that are universally accepted as unreliable, and don't confine their reports to what business people are saying about their own business prospects? In this instance, their confidence was down a little but still positive — quite the opposite to the general view that made the headlines.

The findings of another article, "The Status Quo is Better than We Think" is relevant to business surveys. It concerns research into people's opinions on the world around them which concluded that most of us are "excessively pessimistic." 

One example given was an answer to the question, " What percentage of the world’s one-year-olds have been vaccinated against  disease?  The question was posed as a multi-choice, with the options being 20, 50, or 80 percent.  The answer - thanks to international vaccination efforts - is 80 percent, but people only correctly picked this response 13 percent of the time.  All the questions surveyed typically erred on the side of pessimism—just as they usually do with the general questions in most business surveys.

--ACW

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The latest 1News Colmar Brunton poll has
Labour on 45% up 2
National on 42% down 4
Greens on 6% up 1
NZFirst on 3% down 1
and the Maori Party and TOP on 1%
As preferred PM
Jacinda Adern has 44% up 5
Simon Bridges 6%, his lowest ever
Judith Collins 6%
Winston Peters 3%