The index was down by an unprecedented 35.8 percentage points in April compared to March, but the relaxation of the lockdown measures has brought a considerable improvement this month.

Nevertheless, the business sentiment index in May is 40.8 percentage points lower year-on-year, and 33.2 points below the long-term average.

The Statistics Office noted that the monthly improvement in May was mostly due to the index measuring confidence in manufacturing going up, contributing 4.9 percentage points to the overall increase.

The indices for the remaining sectors had somewhat smaller impact, while the index measuring confidence in the construction sector actually had a slight negative impact (-0.1 of a percentage point).