Advanced estimates of regional accounts: an alternative approach by spatial panels

The policies related to regional economic activity developed by European Union (EU) and the role played by regions as economic subject have determined a bigger set of disaggregated statistics at macroeconomic level. The methodologies used nowadays by the Italian national institute of statistics (ISTAT) are based on an information set build on the basis of inner statistical surveys and other external sources. The estimates of regional accounts carried out on the complete information set require an amount of time bigger than the one expected for the already mentioned aims. A strong need to carry out advanced estimates of regional accounts in a quicker time has emerged. The Kalman filter could be the right tool if we use a short time series span. Since it is available a larger data set from ISTAT web site (www.istat.it) from 1980 up to 2004, a different approach will be performed here, and is mainly based on Spatial Panel recently used by Elhorst and Baltagi. SAR (simultaneous autocorrelation model) and SEM (simultaneous error model) will be used. In a similar fashion the first log differences of ULA (units of labour) will be used to forecast the first log differences of four value added branches at constant prices. Finally some conclusions will be drawn on the performances of SAR and SEM