Statistical offices have often recourse to benchmarking methods for compiling quarterly national accounts (QNA). Benchmarking methods employ quarterly indicator series (i) to distribute annual, more reliable series of national accounts and (ii) to extrapolate the most recent quarters not yet...

As the pandemic heigthened policymakers' demand for more frequent and timely indicators to assess economic activities, traditional data collection and compilation methods to produce official indicators are falling short-triggering stronger interest in real time data to provide early signals of...

Vessel traffic data based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a big data source for nowcasting trade activity in real time. Using Malta as a benchmark, we develop indicators of trade and maritime activity based on AIS-based port calls. We test the quality of these indicators by...

Benchmarking methods can be used to extrapolate (or 'nowcast') low-frequency benchmarks on the basis of available high-frequency indicators. Quarterly national accounts are a typical example, where a number of monthly and quarterly indicators of economic activity are used to calculate...

In March 2017, the IMF published an upgrade of its Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) dataset. This paper documents the new methodology that has been developed to estimate missing observations of bilateral trade statistics on a monthly basis. The new estimation procedure is founded on a...