High-Frequency Indicators of Economic Activity

Source details

Target Audience:
- Officials responsible for compiling short-term or monthly economic indicators in central banks and statistical offices.
Qualifications:
- Participants should have a degree in economics or statistics or equivalent experience.

Purpose:
- Identification and assessment of elementary indicators and techniques for combining them into a single index of economic activity to track national trends.
Rationale:
- Flash estimates or indexes of economic activity bring together a range of elementary indicators to give timely general measures of economic activity.
- These measures give policy makers useful information that complements annual and quarterly GDP estimates, which are more comprehensive but usually only available after substantial lags, and provide a more comprehensive picture than individual monthly and quarterly indicators, which are up-to-the-minute but reflect just a portion of the total economy.
Practical emphasis:
- The course is for actual or potential compilers of short-term indicators in central banks and statistical offices and for those who collect data for monthly indicators.
- Participants are expected to work with their own monthly and quarterly time series during the course.
- These indicators will be used in the practical session as the basis for experimental estimates.

Upon completion of the course, participants should be able to:

Explain the nature and potential uses of high frequency statistics on economic activity as well as their relation and consistency within the system of national accounts.
Develop a simple framework to compile an index of economic activity, from collection of source data to implementation of simple statistical methods and index compilation techniques.
Exploit useful short-term information contained in the IEA by applying some analytical tools, deriving tables, and statistical procedures.