Forecasting Euro Area Real GDP : Optimal Pooling of Information

This paper proposes a new method of forecasting euro area quarterly real GDP that uses areawide indicators, which are derived by optimally pooling the information contained in national indicator series. Following the ideas of predictive modeling, we construct the area-wide indicators by utilizing weights that minimize the variance of the out-of-sample forecast errors of the area-wide target variable. In an out-of-sample forecast experiment we find that our optimal pooling of information approach outperforms alternative forecasting methods in terms of forecast accuracy