In recent months the German software industry has gained extensive public prominence for manifesting a phenomenon not seen on this scale in Germany for decades: a dire labor shortage. As even the general public has been made aware by the Bündnis für Arbeit, Germany’s information technology...

The paper discusses some widely used methods for estimating output gaps based on aggregated datafor the Euro-zone. Though these methods exhibit some common features, an empirical comparisondemonstrates that the various techniques differ substantially. In particular, the correlation of output...