The Ifo Business Climate in trade and industry, the well-known representative of the monthly business surveys of the Ifo Institute, is an accepted leading indicator for the development of the German economy. The Business Climate is composed of the current assessment of business situtation and...

This paper evaluates short-term forecasts of real GDP in the Euro area derived from the CESifo Economic Climate indicator (WES) in terms of forecast accuracy. We compare the forecast properties of the WES with those of monthly composite indicators. Considering the WES is interesting because (i)...

We analyze the predictive power of seven leading indicators for economic activity in the Euro Area developed by different banks, institutions and research centers. Our comparison is conducted in a bivariate vector autoregressive framework. Indicators are compared by means of an in-sample and an...

This paper compares the German Gross Domestic Product between 1991 and 2008 with the Ifo business indicators. Because GDP is published quarterly but the Ifo indicators monthly, the most analyses compare these variables by merging the indicators to quarterly data. In this paper an alternative way...