Germany: Business confidence improves in April
Business confidence rose to 96.8 in April from March’s 96.6. April’s result marked the best performance since June 2019. As a result, the index moved closer to the 100-threshold, but still indicated pessimism among businesses.
The rise came on the back of an improvement in firms’ assessments of the current economic situation. In contrast, views of the future economic situation deteriorated, returning to pessimism.
Clemens Fuest, president of the ifo Institute, commented:
“Companies once again raised their assessments of the current business situation. However, they were no longer quite so optimistic about the coming six months. Both the third wave of infections and bottlenecks in intermediate products are impeding Germany’s economic recovery.”