One major shortcoming in Euroland's National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) consists in the missing distinction between exports (imports) on the one hand and dispatches (arrivals) between the member states on the other hand. In this paper "true" NIPA trade is derived from official figures....

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...