This paper describes the methodology used in the OECD Economics Department to produce historical estimates and short-run projections of potential output. These estimates are used mainly in the OECD Economic Outlook, in country surveys and as starting point for long-run scenarios. Total-economy...

The output gap is a key variable of business cycle analysis and policy. Obtaining reliable estimates for it, is very difficult, though. Most real-time estimates are frequently revised over time. The idea of this paper is to use various indicators, for example from business surveys, that (i) were...

This paper analyzes how the OECD revises potential output (PO) estimates after recessions. We show that downward revisions are substantial and mostly driven by supply shocks while PO estimates do not significantly react to demand shocks. In addition, revisions are partly caused by avoidable...

We present estimates of finance-adjusted output gaps which incorporate the information on the domestic and global credit cycles for a sample of emerging market economies (EMEs). Following recent BIS research, we use a state-space representation of an HP filter augmented with a measure of the...

The paper assesses the impact of adding information on financial cycles on the output gap estimates for eight advanced economies using two unobserved components models: a reduced form extended Hodrick-Prescott filter, and a standard semi-structural unobserved components model. To complement...

The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2022 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the...

We estimate the euro area output gap by applying the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition based on a large Bayesian vector autoregression. Our approach incorporates multivariate information through the inclusion of a wide range of variables in the analysis and addresses data issues associated with the...

Output gap revisions can be large even after many years. Real-time reliability tests might therefore be sensitive to the choice of the final output gap vintage that the real-time estimates are compared to. This is the case for the Federal Reserve's output gap. When accounting for revisions in...

The NAIRU is a key component of potential output and as such critically affects output gap estimates. In May 2014, the European Commission changed its specification of the NAIRU for several countries and lowered its NAIRU estimates - in the case of Spain from 26.6% to 20.7% for 2015. To test the...

This paper analyses the monetary and fiscal policy implications of output gap estimates in times of crisis. The widening of output gaps observed in major OECD economies in the wake of the recent crisis has been mainly due to total factor productivity gaps, except in the United States where it...