Philippines Business Confidence Falls

The business community “turned less optimistic” about the third quarter of the year, results of the latest Business Expectations Survey by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas showed Friday, gmanet reported. The overall confidence index declined to 37.9% from 43% of the second quarter of 2017. “This means that the number of optimists declined but continued to be greater than the number of pessimists during the quarter,” the central bank said in an emailed statement. The CI is computed as the percentage of firms that answered in the affirmative, minus the percentage of the firms that answered in the negative with respect to their views on a given indicator. “The sentiment of businesses in the Philippines mirrored the less buoyant business outlook in the US, Canada, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Thailand but was in contrast to the more bullish views of those in Germany and Hong Kong and steady outlook in France,” the BSP said.