In the 1940s, in order to study the impact of consumer demand on the economic cycle, the Research and Research Center of the University of Michigan first compiled the Consumer Confidence Index, and then some European countries also began to establish and compile the Consumer Confidence Index. In December 1997, the Prosperity Monitoring Center of the National Bureau of Statistics of China began to compile the China Consumer Confidence Index. Beijing, as the capital of the country, took the lead in establishing a consumer confidence index survey system at the provincial and municipal levels in early 2002 on the basis of extensive domestic and foreign experience.
The consumer confidence index is an indicator that reflects the strength of consumer confidence. It comprehensively reflects and quantifies consumers’ evaluation of the current economic situation and their subjective feelings about economic prospects, income levels, income expectations and consumer psychology, and predicts economic trends and consumption trends. A leading indicator of trends.
The consumer confidence index is composed of the consumer satisfaction index and the consumer expectation index. The consumer satisfaction index refers to consumers’ evaluation of the current economic life, and the consumer expectation index refers to consumers’ expectations of changes in the future economic life. The consumer satisfaction index and the consumer expectation index are respectively composed of some secondary indicators: satisfaction with income, quality of life, macro economy, consumer spending, employment status, purchase of durable consumer goods and savings, and expectations for the next year and the purchase of housing and decoration in the next two years, purchase of automobiles, and stock market changes in the next 6 months.
According to the theory of economics, consumption is a function of income. In the final analysis, consumer confidence (or sentiment) is a reflection of consumers’ evaluation and expectations of their household income level. This evaluation and expectation are based on consumers’ subjective understanding of various factors that restrict household income level. These factors mainly include: economic development situation of a country or region, unemployment rate, price level, interest rate, etc. Changes in these factors over a certain period of time will inevitably lead to changes in consumer confidence (or sentiment), and changes in consumer confidence (or sentiment) lead to changes in their consumption decisions and thus affect the process of economic development. The consumer confidence index is a measure of changes in consumers’ psychological feelings of consumption. It is an indicator that reflects the degree of changes in consumer confidence calculated by collecting data from household surveys and using certain statistical methods.