An Application of TRAMO and SEATS: Report for the "Seasonal Adjustment Research Appraisal" Project.

The Seasonal Adjustment Research Appraisal committee was created in Italy to evaluate procedures for seasonal adjustment of economic series. Because the TRAMO-SEATS programs were one of the main procedures considered, the committee sent a selection of 11 series of interest to be analysed. This paper contains the results of the application of TRAMO and SEATS to these series. It is seen that very simple procedures, based mostly on the automatic features, provide parsimonious models and considerably goods results, in terms of seasonal adjustments, trend-cycle estimation, and short-term forecast.