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Survey shows faltering business confidence in Latvia

Xinhua, February 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

More than one third of Latvian entrepreneurs polled in a survey said the year of 2014 was better than 2013, the latest Citadele Index shows.

Four percent of respondents in Citadele Bank's survey described last year as much better and 32 percent as slightly better than 2013.

At the same time, 22 percent of the surveyed entrepreneurs described last year as slightly worse and seven percent as much worse than 2013, while 34 percent said there were no difference between 2014 and the year before.

The Citadele Index survey is conducted quarterly to find out entrepreneurs' subjective opinion about the state of the Latvian economy and their outlook on the next six months. The surveys are conducted among 750 heads of companies of various sizes from all regions of Latvia and representing various industries.

Arnis Kaktins, the head of Latvia's SKDS market research and polling agency which conducted the survey for Citadele Bank, told journalists at the presentation of the Citadele Index on Tuesday that 35 percent of respondents in the poll expected the situation in 2015 to be similar to last year, 31 percent expected slight improvement and 13 percent anticipated deterioration.

The outlook of entrepreneurs representing the manufacturing, trade, construction and services sectors tended to be mostly pessimistic, with only representatives of large enterprises and companies with foreign capital showing cautious optimism, according to the survey.

"There is no tendency for the pessimism to deepen, but at the same time it is safe to say that pessimism among the statistically average Latvian entrepreneurs is prevalent," Kaktins said.

Latvia's exporters, who traditionally have been much more upbeat about their business prospects than non-exporting businesses, started displaying increasingly pessimistic sentiments in the fourth quarter of 2014, with their outlook growing quite similar to that of the non-exporting businesses.

"The non-exporting enterprises even had a bit more positive outlook on the future than the exporters," said Kaktins.

For the second consecutive quarter, most pessimistic forecasts were voiced by business people in all Latvia's regions, especially its economically least developed region of Latgale in eastern Latvia. Endit