This brief reviews the evolution of the US and the European labour markets since the beginning of the financial crisis. In the US, the unemployment rate and the share of long-term unemployment grew very fast, during the crisis, thereby reaching levels close to those in the EU. Does that mean...

The global crisis has taken its toll on the EU’s prime position in international trade. While the EU still has the largest relative market shares, its position has deteriorated since the crisis, much more so than the US, and its comparative advantage in knowledge-intensive goods has been...

If the various data are combined, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the effects of the crisis and the social consequences of the economic downturn are largely related to the economic and social policies of a country's government. A review of the basic socioeconomic indicators for the...

While Latvia had one of the world’s fastest growth rates before the recession, it has lost about a quarter of its GDP since the recession hit. Although the economy is now growing at a good pace, the projections of the ministry for economic affairs suggest that, at best, it will not be able to...

The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the "death of the cycle". Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

In this paper we propose a relatively simple procedure to predict Euro-zone industrial production using mostly data derived from the business surveys of the three major economies within the European Monetary Union (France, Germany, and Italy). The basic idea is that of estimating business...

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...