IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/onb/oenbmp/y2005i3b4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An Overview of European Economic Indicators: Great Variety of Data on the Euro Area, Need for More Extensive Coverage of the New EU Member States

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Antoinette Silgoner

    (Oesterreichische Nationalbank)

Abstract

This contribution provides an overview of the most common short-term indicators of economic development in the euro area. These indicators are useful when official data are released with long time lags or if they are subject to major revisions. Indicators based on surveys among businesses, households, financial market analysts or forecasters have the advantage of providing detailed and timely information on individual sectors on a monthly basis and largely without later revision. As an additional instrument, composite indicators, which are calculated by combining a variety of measures into a single indicator with the help of regression and factor analysis, offer an attractive tool for drawing conclusions from different, often divergent signals. Even the most reliable economic indicators, however, can only be interpreted as constituent elements of comprehensive economic analysis. With regard to the new EU Member States, coverage is found to be limited as yet. This study also shows that the forecasting quality of the European Commission 's business and consumer surveys for the new Member States is not as high as for the other EU Member States. As the reliability of economic indicators increases as forecasting institutions and respondents gain more experience, coverage of established indicators should be extended early on to this group of countries, in particular as some of the new Member States may soon join the euro area. JEL classification: 0110, 520

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Antoinette Silgoner, 2005. "An Overview of European Economic Indicators: Great Variety of Data on the Euro Area, Need for More Extensive Coverage of the New EU Member States," Monetary Policy & the Economy, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), issue 3, pages 66-89.
    • Handle: RePEc:onb:oenbmp:y:2005:i:3:b:4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.oenb.at/dam/jcr:5caf75ee-6277-4f29-92ab-013a6c80867b/mop_2005_q3_analysis4_tcm16-34759.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martin Schneider & Martin Spitzer, 2004. "Forecasting Austrian GDP using the generalized dynamic factor model," Working Papers 89, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    2. Forni, Mario & Lippi, Marco, 2001. "The Generalized Dynamic Factor Model: Representation Theory," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 17(6), pages 1113-1141, December.
    3. Marcellino, Massimiliano, 2005. "Leading Indicators: What Have We Learned?," CEPR Discussion Papers 4977, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. repec:onb:oenbwp:y::i:89:b:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    6. Graham Elliott & Allan Timmermann, 2016. "Economic Forecasting," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10740.
    7. Arthur F. Burns & Wesley C. Mitchell, 1946. "Measuring Business Cycles," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number burn46-1, July.
    8. Mario Forni & Lucrezia Reichlin, 1998. "Let's Get Real: A Factor Analytical Approach to Disaggregated Business Cycle Dynamics," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 65(3), pages 453-473.
    9. Christian Dreger & Christian Schumacher, 2005. "Out-of-sample Performance of Leading Indicators for the German Business Cycle: Single vs. Combined Forecasts," Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, OECD Publishing, Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys, vol. 2005(1), pages 71-87.
    10. Mario Forni & Marc Hallin & Marco Lippi & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2000. "The Generalized Dynamic-Factor Model: Identification And Estimation," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 82(4), pages 540-554, November.
    11. Roy Batchelor, 2001. "How useful are the forecasts of intergovernmental agencies? The IMF and OECD versus the consensus," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(2), pages 225-235.
    12. Kunst, Robert M., 2003. "Testing for Relative Predictive Accuracy: A Critical Viewpoint," Economics Series 130, Institute for Advanced Studies.
    13. Ronald Bewley & Denzil G. Fiebig, 2002. "On the herding instinct of interest rate forecasters," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 27(3), pages 403-425.
    14. Thomas J. Sargent & Christopher A. Sims, 1977. "Business cycle modeling without pretending to have too much a priori economic theory," Working Papers 55, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    15. Jean-Jacques Vanhaelen & Luc Dresse & Jan De Mulder, 2000. "The Belgian industrial confidence indicator: leading indicator of economic activity in the euro area ?," Working Paper Document 12, National Bank of Belgium.
    16. Rebecca A Emerson & David Hendry, 1994. "An evaluation of forecasting using leading indicators," Economics Papers 5., Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
    17. Vanhaelen, J.J. & Dresse, L. & de Mulder, J., 2000. "The Belgian Industrial Confidence Indicator: Leading Indicator of Economic Activity in the Euro Area?," Papers 12, Warwick - Development Economics Research Centre.
    18. Peter Grasmann & Filip Keereman, 2001. "An indicator-based short-term forecast for quarterly GDP in the euro area," European Economy - Economic Papers 2008 - 2015 154, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.
    19. Francis X. Diebold & Glenn D. Rudebusch, 1989. "Forecasting output with the composite leading index: an ex ante analysis," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 90, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    20. Schröder, Michael & Hüfner, Felix P., 2002. "Forecasting economic activity in Germany: how useful are sentiment indicators?," ZEW Discussion Papers 02-56, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ard H.J. den Reijer, 2005. "Forecasting Dutch GDP using Large Scale Factor Models," DNB Working Papers 028, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    2. M. Ayhan Kose & Christopher Otrok & Eswar Prasad, 2012. "Global Business Cycles: Convergence Or Decoupling?," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 53(2), pages 511-538, May.
    3. Marc Hallin & Roman Liska, 2008. "Dynamic Factors in the Presence of Block Structure," Working Papers ECARES 2008_012, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    4. Karim Barhoumi & Olivier Darné & Laurent Ferrara, 2010. "Are disaggregate data useful for factor analysis in forecasting French GDP?," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(1-2), pages 132-144.
    5. Curran, Declan & Funke, Michael, 2006. "Taking the temperature: forecasting GDP growth for mainland in China," BOFIT Discussion Papers 6/2006, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    6. repec:onb:oenbwp:y::i:89:b:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Christophe Van Nieuwenhuyze, 2006. "A generalised dynamic factor model for the Belgian economy - Useful business cycle indicators and GDP growth forecasts," Working Paper Research 80, National Bank of Belgium.
    8. repec:zbw:bofitp:2006_006 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Reichlin, Lucrezia, 2002. "Factor Models in Large Cross-Sections of Time Series," CEPR Discussion Papers 3285, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Declan Curran & Michael Funke, 2006. "Taking the Temperature - Forecasting GDP Growth for Mainland China," Quantitative Macroeconomics Working Papers 20606, Hamburg University, Department of Economics.
    11. Lippi, Marco & Reichlin, Lucrezia & Hallin, Marc & Forni, Mario & Altissimo, Filippo & Cristadoro, Riccardo & Veronese, Giovanni & Bassanetti, Antonio, 2001. "EuroCOIN: A Real Time Coincident Indicator of the Euro Area Business Cycle," CEPR Discussion Papers 3108, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    12. Eliana González & Luis F. Melo & Viviana Monroy & Brayan Rojas, 2009. "A Dynamic Factor Model For The Colombian Inflation," Borradores de Economia 5273, Banco de la Republica.
    13. Simona Delle Chiaie & Laurent Ferrara & Domenico Giannone, 2022. "Common factors of commodity prices," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(3), pages 461-476, April.
    14. Olivier Bandt & Catherine Bruneau & Alexis Flageollet, 2006. "Assessing Aggregate Comovements in France, Germany and Italy Using a Non Stationary Factor Model of the Euro Area," Springer Books, in: Convergence or Divergence in Europe?, pages 95-120, Springer.
    15. Alhassan Abdullah Mohammed, 2011. "A Coincident Indicator of the Gulf Cooperation Council Business Cycle," Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, De Gruyter, vol. 6(3), pages 1-23, February.
    16. Nii Ayi Armah & Norman Swanson, 2010. "Seeing Inside the Black Box: Using Diffusion Index Methodology to Construct Factor Proxies in Large Scale Macroeconomic Time Series Environments," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(5-6), pages 476-510.
    17. Forni, Mario & Hallin, Marc & Lippi, Marco & Reichlin, Lucrezia, 2005. "The Generalized Dynamic Factor Model: One-Sided Estimation and Forecasting," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 100, pages 830-840, September.
    18. Schumacher Christian & Dreger Christian, 2004. "Estimating Large-Scale Factor Models for Economic Activity in Germany: Do They Outperform Simpler Models? / Die Schätzung von großen Faktormodellen für die deutsche Volkswirtschaft: Übertreffen sie ei," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 224(6), pages 731-750, December.
    19. Stock, J.H. & Watson, M.W., 2016. "Dynamic Factor Models, Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressions, and Structural Vector Autoregressions in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 415-525, Elsevier.
    20. repec:dgr:rugccs:200312 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Hendry, David F. & Hubrich, Kirstin, 2006. "Forecasting economic aggregates by disaggregates," Working Paper Series 589, European Central Bank.
    22. Wolfgang Nierhaus & Timo Wollmershäuser, 2016. "ifo Konjunkturumfragen und Konjunkturanalyse: Band II," ifo Forschungsberichte, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 72.
    23. Nii Ayi Armah & Norman Swanson, 2011. "Some variables are more worthy than others: new diffusion index evidence on the monitoring of key economic indicators," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(1-2), pages 43-60.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Leading indicators.;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:onb:oenbmp:y:2005:i:3:b:4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rita Glaser-Schwarz (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/oenbbat.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.