Bahrain business confidence index gains in Q2

22/05/2017 15:55 AST

The business confidence index in Bahrain has amounted to more than 19.91 positive points in the second quarter of 2017, according to a survey conducted by the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA).

The survey measures indexes of investors’ confidence, evaluate the current situations as well as expectations of their future performance and activities in Bahrain.

About 41.8 per cent of institutions expressed their optimism in the continued improvements of the business commercial environment performance as well as its activity during the upcoming period.

On the other hand, 49 per cent of respondents expected business conditions to remain at the same pace, while 9.2 per cent of institutions expressed dissatisfaction towards their future situation and trade.

As for opinions of institutions of their situation during the first quarter of 2017, the survey showcased that 24.8 per cent of institutions expressed their satisfaction with the performance of their work while 17 per cent of these institutions were dissatisfied during the first quarter of this year. Survey results also comprised the measuring of confidence in business environment according to the size of the institution, sector, industry as well as type of investment.

The implementation of this survey comes in line with the series of economic survey studies that the directorate executes on regular basis; some of which include the implementation of the foreign investment survey project supported by Bahrain’s Economic Development Board (EDB) - the general authority with the role of attracting foreign investments to the Kingdom along with supporting initiatives that contribute in improving the investment environment in the country.

The role of EDB is to work with the government, current and potential investors so as to ensure the capability of Bahrain’s investment environment in attracting and sustaining them.

The survey aims at providing the necessary information for investors as well as decision-makers, economic policy makers to facilitate the process of appropriate decision-making and execute the resulted procedures. These procedures ensure the creation of suitable environment to attract and execute the resulted procedures while ensuring suitable environment to attract more investments as well as enhance the competitive capability to continue the growth of the business sector by providing real indexes to measure the investors’ confidence level in addition to size of enterprises, sector, industries and type of investments.

Business Confidence Indexes based on opinion polls, within the commercial environment and are being conducted by iGA across a sample, represent the commercial institutions and comprise micro-enterprises to large-scale enterprises classified as foreign or local investments and own huge capital or has foreign shareholders.

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