Despite signs of recovery from the global financial crisis, the GDP growth rate for the Indian economy is likely to be between 5.8 to 6.1 per cent in 2009-10, below the 6.7 per cent recorded in fiscal 2008-09. While there has been an improvement in Indian industry, particularly the manufacturing...

This paper provides an outlook for the Indian economy in the light of the extraordinary global financial crisis, that started in the US, but which has now transformed into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Indian economy was slowing down even before the onset of global...

The primary goal of this paper is to describe several models that are currently used at the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia (NBRM) for short-term forecasting of inflation - Autoregressive integrated moving average models (aggregated and disaggregated approach), three equation...

Economic policies are generally formulated on the basis of data available in real time, which might subsequently be revised. Implicitly, the possibility of data revisions creates an element of uncertainty around the very same data driving policy decisions. Given that such uncertainty could be...

When do financial markets help in predicting economic activity? With incomplete markets, the link between financial and real economy is state-dependent and financial indicators may turn out to be useful particularly in forecasting "tail" macroeconomic events. We examine this conjecture by...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, “CEV”) propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, thiscould help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

This paper describes a dynamic factor model for the Maltese economy. The model mainly serves as a tool to timely provide the Central Bank of Malta with nowcasts as well as short-term forecasts of the growth rate of the real gross domestic product, which in turn are used as an input in the...

Aggregate demand forecasting, also known as nowcasting when it applies to current quarter assessment, is of notable interest to policy makers. This paper concentrates on the empirical methods dealing with mixed-frequency data. In particular, it focuses on the MIDAS approach and its later...

This paper uses a dynamic CGE model to assess the intertemporal and spatial dimension of technology spillovers embodied in international trade within a climate and trade policy framework. Three are the main contributions of the study. First, to include endogenous factor-biased technical change...