This paper builds an innovative composite world trade cycle index (WTI) by means of a dynamic factor model to monitor and perform short-term forecasts in real time of world trade growth of both goods and (usually neglected) services. The selection of trade indicator series is made using a...

This paper evaluates different models for the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in ten selected European countries and the euro area as a whole. Purely quarterly models are compared with models designed to exploit early releases of monthly indicators for the nowcast and forecast of...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

We estimate dynamic factor models for two sub-samples between 1995 and 2017 for up to 42 advanced and emerging-market economies to investigate changes in the contribution of global and regional factors to fluctuations in real GDP per capita growth, inflation, 10-year government bond yields and...