AbstractIn this paper forecasting the production volume of the Swedish and Finnish metal and engineering industries one quarter ahead is discussed. A practical way of making use of the predictive information in the answers of the quarterly business survey is presented which is based on the application of the Kalman filter. It is found that the most informative questions of the business survey from the point of view of forecasting are different in the two countries. However, for both Sweden and Finland, the improvement in prediction accuracy after taking account of relevant business survey information is significant when the precision of autoprojective forecasts is used as a baseline.