Despite a strong start to 2025, the German economy will experience middling growth for the time being before beginning a long-awaited upturn at the end of the year. DIW Berlin's forecast indicates growth of 0.3 percent for 2025 and of 1.7 percent for 2026; thus, DIW Berlin is increasing its forecast...

The ifo Business Climate Index is one of the most important leading indicators for the German economy. It is based on a monthly survey of approximately 9,000 firms and reflects responses to two core questions: the assessment of the firms' current business situation and their expectations for the...

The special topic examines the impact of selected factors on consumers' views of their country's economic situation, based on a supplementary ad hoc question added to the February/March 2025 waves of the consumer survey. The analysis assesses the responses at the EU level, as well as by country...

This Spring Forecast projects real GDP growth in 2025 at 1.1% in the EU and 0.9% in the euro area- broadly the same rates attained in 2024. This represents a considerable downgrade compared to the Autumn 2024 Forecast (AF24), largely due to the impact of increased tariffs and the heightened...

After two years of recession, Austria's economic output is likely to stagnate in 2025. WIFO expects GDP growth of 1.2 percent in 2026. The upturn in the global economy should then give the Austrian economy some momentum again, driven by both exports and domestic demand.

Increasing geopolitical tensions and trade fragmentation are challenging the resilience of global value chains, by undermining the collaborative networks on which they depend. As countries impose trade restrictions or become less reliable partners, companies may reconfigure their supply chains,...

The paper compares two forecasts of Slovak GDP, the first with high-frequency data and the second without them. We utilize the last observation from the economic activity index acting as a short-term GDP forecast. We use data from 2000 to 2024 in weekly frequencies and have 27 variables related...

In April, sceptical economic assessments continued to prevail. By sector, the deterioration was particularly evident in services and retail trade. In manufacturing, economic assessments improved but remained at a low level. Compared with the previous quarter, uncertainty rose particularly in...

The German economy is stuck in a period of stagnation: Following two years of consecutive slight declines in GDP, growth is not expected for 2025 either. Weak exports, rising unemployment worries, and the resulting reserved private consumption and economic policy uncertainty are slowing the...

Recent rises in macroeconomic volatility have prompted the introduction of quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) models to forecast macroeconomic risk. This paper provides an extensive evaluation of the predictive performance of QVAR models in a pseudo-out-of-sample experiment spanning 112...

This paper focuses on identifying useful indicators for nowcasting GDP in Sweden. We analyze 35 monthly indicators spanning the period from 1993 to 2023. Additionally, we evaluate the group-wise performance of these indicators. The analysis is conducted using mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) and...

In addition to the well-known ifo Business Climate Index for Germany, the ifo Business Survey generates a wide range of further indicators based on monthly responses from around 9,000 companies across all major sectors. These indicators capture current business conditions, expectations,...

The German economy is still awaiting stronger momentum. Leading indicators have stabilized in recent months, and business expectations have seen marked improvement in anticipation of higher public spending. Nonetheless, economic activity is likely to remain broadly flat through the end of the...

This article develops a novel economic sentiment indicator (LLM-ESI) by applying large language models to open-ended responses from Swiss business tendency surveys. Using a BERT-based transformer model, it extracts firmlevel sentiment from free-text survey comments and aggregates it into a...

We propose a methodology for constructing confidence intervals for macroeconomic forecasts that directly incorporate quantitative measures of uncertainty – such as survey-based indicators, stock market volatility, and policy uncertainty. By allowing the width of confidence intervals to vary...

The German economy is slowly emerging from its trough. After a bumpy start to the year, which was marked by tariff-related special effects, growth in 2025 remains subdued at 0.2 percent. However, the economy is gradually picking up speed from the current third quarter onwards. Over the next two...

This study aims to construct a sentiment index for predicting CPI in Vietnam. Adopting a lexicon-based approach, the study utilized two widely recognized sentiment dictionaries, specialized in financial and economic contexts, to build the sentiment index. Data was mined from nine official...

This study examines how effectively common factors, extracted using both the partial least squares method and principal component analysis from the business tendency survey and the banking loan tendency survey, can predict Turkiye's economic growth. The findings indicate that integrating this...