This Policy Brief introduces the Gini Trade Index (GTI) as a new trade synthetic key performance indicator capable of capturing the different distribution of trade values across firm characteristics and across countries. The new indicator replicates the well-known features of the traditional...

We test the performance of a host of real and financial variables as early warning indicators for costly aggregate asset price boom/bust cycles, using data for 18 OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. A signalling approach is used to predict asset price booms that have relatively serious real...

With its 21 variables, the new composite globalisation index presented in this paper accounts for the multidimensionality of this phenomenon instead of relying purely on economic indicators. As compared to other existing globalisation indices, three major innovations are introduced: First, five...

Regressions and tests performed on data from Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) 2004 survey show that personal or household experience of bribery is not a good predictor of perceptions held about corruption among the general population. In contrast, perceptions about...

Der Begriff der europäischen Integration findet in wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen und politi-schen Debatten zwar große Verwendung, eine einheitliche Definition existiert jedoch nicht. Hierdurch sind Integrationsschritte oder -prozesse kaum quantifizierbar. Auch wird selten darauf eingegangen,...

Seit 25 Jahren wird das Konzept der Nachhaltigkeit intensiv diskutiert. Die Leistung dieses Ansatzes liegt darin, dass ökonomische, soziale und ökologische Aspekte in einen Gesamtkontext gestellt werden. Mit ihnen werden die Dimensionen Wirtschaftlichkeit, soziale Sicherheit und...

We develop an unconventional activity index for the German economy at weekly frequency in order to monitor economic developments at the current end in real time. The index contains nine high-frequency, rather unconventional weekly indicators. These are augmented by monthly industrial production...

This paper introduces a weekly GDP indicator to track real economic activity in Germany in real-time. We use a mixed-frequency dynamic factor model with quarterly, monthly, and weekly indicators and obtain the weekly GDP indicator as the weighted common component of the mixed-frequency dataset....