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.

Presented by the Statistics Department.
Focus: Identification and assessment of elementary indicators and techniques for combining them into a single overall index of economic activity to track trends in the economy.
Rationale: Flash estimates or indexes of economic activity bring together a range of specific economic elementary indicators to give timely overall measures of economic activity. Such measures give useful information to policy makers complementing the annual and quarterly GDP estimates (which are more comprehensive but usually only available after substantial lags) and provide a more comprehensive picture than a set of individual monthly and quarterly indicators (which are up-to-the-minute but reflect just a portion of the total economy).
Orientation: The course is oriented toward actual or potential compilers of short-term indicators in central banks and statistical offices as well as those involved in data collection of monthly indicators.
Practical approach: Participants are expected to work with their own available monthly and quarterly time series during the course. These indicators will be used in the practical session to develop experimental estimates.

Upon completion of this 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.