Relevancia del índice de malestar económico

The conventional Misery Index describes the economic environment based on the unemployment and inflation rates. The compensated Misery Index also takes into account GDP' rate of growth. In this paper we calculate both indexes for Spain and neighbouring countries and highlight the relative weight of the different components in different moments in time. The indexes reflect situations of misery from objective data. We then compare these results with subjective measures of misery using survey data (CIS' questions on Current Economic Situation). We show that both measures are strongly correlated. It thus folllows that the misery index is a relevant and useful index to explain tough economic situations with the added advantage of a being easy to compute and publicly available and frequently published data.