Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries …, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms offorecast accuracy and, second, at checking whether methods … forecasting di-rectly aggregate variables (direct approaches) outperform methods based onthe aggregation of country …

Indices (PMI) in anticipating US real economic activity. We conduct a fully-fledged real-time out-ofsample forecasting … forecasting GDP growth, while it performs quite poorly in anticipating industrial production growth. Combining the information …