In this paper we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the euro area GDP growth and unemployment rate forecasts collected in the quarterly ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) over the period 1999Q1–2008Q4. Our results suggest that while SPF forecasts generally appear to be slightly...

A coincident business cycle indicator for the Milan area is built on the basis of a monthly industrial survey carried out by Assolombarda, the largest territorial entrepreneurial association in Italy. The indicator is extracted from three time series concerning the production level and the...

This paper discusses the measurement error of conversion methods used to convert survey data to a quantitative index, especially the Carlson and Parkin (1975) method. When we want to summarise economic conditions using a numerical value, we often have to depend on survey data and convert them to...

A dynamic factor model is applied to a large panel dataset of Singapore’s macroeconomic variables and global economic indicators with the initial objective of analysing business cycles in a small open economy. The empirical results suggest that four common factors – which can broadly be...

In this study we construct a business cycle indicator for the Netherlands. The Christiano-Fitzgerald band-pass filtter is employed to isolate the cycle using the definition of business cycle frequencies as waves with lengths longer than 3 years and shorter than 11 years. The coincident business...

The information content of qualitative survey responses are confronted with the corresponding quantitative figures on a firm-by-firm basis. This comparison permits to directly check the information content of the qualitative data. The findings indicate that survey respondents provide correct...

This paper develops a time series model to forecast the growth in imports by major advanced economies in the current and following year (two to six quarters ahead). Both pure time series analysis and structural approaches that include additional predictors based on economic theory are used. Our...

We pursue a two-fold objective in this paper. First, we try to describe comprehensively the behaviour of sectoral growth cycles in Turkish manufacturing by using several statistical measures and to analyse the co-movement between them via correlation and peak-through analysis. One of the...

This paper proposes an indicator for detecting business cycles turning points incorporating mixed frequency business survey data. It is based on a hidden Markow-Switching model and allows for the detection of regime changes in a given economy where information is displayed monthly, bimonthly and...

A business cycle is recognized as a growth cycle in a continuously growing economy such as Korea. This paper suggests reasonable dating rules for the reference date of a business cycle using various measures of a growth cycle. These measures are a cyclical component of the coincident composite...