Professed values and consumer confidence level in European countries

The aim of this article is to assess dependencies between the basic categories of human values and the main indicator of the economic sentiment of a population – the consumer confidence index. It is a research article and it presents the results of empirical analyses. The data used in the analyses come from the international comparative research conducted every two years since 2002 (the European Social Survey) and research conducted on a monthly basis with the use of the situation test. The analyses were conducted on the basis of cross-sectional data series for 22 selected European countries. The assessment of the correlation between values and economic sentiment was based on the data from 2006 and 2010. In both periods, it was confirmed that there are statistically significant dependencies between the level of consumer confidence and most of the basic categories of human values. Th e ranking of countries showing their order in accordance with the annual average Consumer Confidence Index drawn up for years 2005-2012 shows a high degree of position stability in the case of most of the countries. In most cases the analysis of correlations confirms very strong dependencies between the values of the Index in successive years, which also indicates that in some countries the Consumer Confidence Index - although it changes with the changes of the economic situation - is always on a relatively low level, whereas in other, it reaches relatively high values.