Shrugging off a stream of bad news around the globe, the YPO Global Pulse Confidence Index for Australia held steady in the first quarter of 2011, inching upwards by 0.4 point to 63.1. This marks its second-highest level since YPO began measuring CEO sentiment in July 2009, when much of the world was just emerging from recession.
At that time, Australia’s confidence level was 52.7 and it has been rising gradually ever since. Now, at 63.1, the economic confidence of CEOs in Australia is just shy of the global reading of 64.3.
On the heels of natural disasters in Japan, the perspective of CEOs in Australia trended with that of survey participants in Asia, with a more tempered optimism about the next six months, but a rosier perspective when looking 12 months ahead. On the whole, countries that are more economically exposed to China than Japan did not see the decline in confidence that Japan and some other markets experienced in the first quarter.
The April quarterly survey results were announced this week by YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization), a not-for-profit global network of 18,000 chief executive officers. The YPO Global Pulse is the only CEO economic sentiment survey to span the globe on a quarterly basis, capturing answers from more than 2,500 CEOs representing companies of all sizes.