The share of private consumption in gross domestic product is significant; therefore, private consumption has a great influence on economic growth, which makes it a major concept in economics. The purpose of the paper is to estimate and evaluate different forecasting models for private...

This paper - which takes into consideration overall experience with the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as well as the improvements made to this measure of inflation since 2003 - finds that the HICP continues to fulfil the prerequisites for the index underlying the ECB's definition of...

In this paper we describe Norges Bank's system for averaging models (SAM) which produces model-based density forecasts for Norwegian Mainland GDP and inflation. We combine the forecasts from three main types of models typically used at central banks: Vector autoregressive models, leading...

Timely and accurate assessment of current macroeconomic activity is crucial for policymakers and other economic agents. Nowcasting aims to forecast the current economic situation ahead of official data releases. We develop and apply a large Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model to nowcast...

Shadow banking, as one of the main sources of financial stability concerns, is the subject of much international debate. In broad terms, shadow banking refers to activities related to credit intermediation and liquidity and maturity transformation that take place outside the regulated banking...

In this paper we provide an overview of the growth model in China and its prospects, taking a medium-run to long-run perspective. Our main conclusions are as follows. First, the still prevailing producer-biased model of managed capitalism in China tends to engender, as an inherent byproduct,...

There are over 3 billion searches globally on Google every day. This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future unemployment rate in Finland. Predicting the present and the near future is of interest, as the official records of the state...

In this report we document the ETLAnow project. ETLAnow is a model for forecasting with big data. At the moment, it predicts the unemployment rate in the EU-28 countries using Google search data. This document is subject to updates as the ETLAnow project advances.

This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future house prices in Finland. Compared to a simple benchmark model, Google searches improve the prediction of the present house price index by 7.5 % measured by mean absolute error. In addition,...

This study provides country-specific empirical evidence on the optimal inflation-growth threshold in the WAMZ over the period 1996-2021. Although there is large empirical literature on this subject, however, previous studies on the WAMZ economies generally focused on exogenous approaches of...