The Leading Economic Indicator, which provides advance information on future trends in the economy, increased by 3.8 points in January 2026, to 174 points. – informed the Office of Investments and Economic Cycles. In November, the indicator was 170.2 points. As the authors of the BIEC report wrote, this strong growth is mainly due to improved assessments of the general development prospects of the economy and the company's own business.
“The strongest improvement concerned the assessments of managers of enterprises in the industrial processing sector regarding the general economic situation and prospects for their company. These assessments are still dominated by pessimists, but the predominance of negative opinions over positive ones decreased from 10.5 percentage points in December 2025 to 2.6 percentage points in January 2026,” reads the BIEC report.
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The office's analysts emphasized that this improvement is difficult to explain “by comparison with the other results of the same study.” They pointed out, among other things, that the rate of inflow of new orders to enterprises has not improved, and in fact the rate of decline has increased.
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“One may get the impression that company managers were pleasantly surprised by the sales results from December last year and transferred these optimistic expectations to the following months of this year. This is all the more likely because the greatest optimism is shown by representatives of those industries that recorded the best sales results in December 2025. These were primarily producers of computers and other electronic equipment, food producers and the pharmaceutical industry,” we read in the BIEC publication.
It added that the financial situation of enterprises had not improved. In this case, there was also a deterioration, because in the January Central Statistical Office survey, the preponderance of negative opinions on the state of companies' finances over positive ones increased from nearly minus 9.9 points in December 2025 to approximately minus 11.5 points. The BIEC publication states that “it is therefore difficult to find justification for such a sudden improvement in assessments of the overall situation if nothing so far heralds increased turnover and higher profits.”
Increasing wage dynamics
“December's data on the M3 money supply brought it a significant increase (in real terms and after removing the impact of seasonal factors, it was an increase of 3.3% compared to the previous month and nearly 10% annually). This increase was mainly due to the higher value of deposits of enterprises and households,” we read in the commentary of BIEC experts. Lending activity was somewhat disappointing.
“The data indicate that entrepreneurs were exceptionally generous when it comes to paying employee benefits in November and December last year, which probably resulted in the accumulation of funds in company accounts, and after the payment of these bonuses, some of this money found an outlet in the form of increased retail sales, and some in the form of increased household deposits,” the report reads.
It was assessed that this may be a one-off phenomenon that will not continue in the coming months.
