This paper examines whether data from business tendency surveys are useful for forecasting the macro economy (GDP, unemployment, price and wage inflation, interest rates, exchange-rate changes etc.) in the short run. The starting point is a so-called dynamic factor model (DFM), which is used...

Since September 2004, Insee has published the results of its business survey in the services sector on a monthly basis together with a synthetic indicator. This indicator is extracted from both monthly and quarterly balances of opinion derived from the survey. The methodological framework is...

This Economic Brief looks at past evidence as to what extent donors' economic cycles have an effect on their aid budgets. It generally finds only a weak correlation of economic growth and aid of OECD donors between 1971 and 2008, and aid was reduced in only about half of all episodes of deep or...