The objective of this article is to reassess the validity of the consumer confidence (or sentiment) indices in anticipating the evolution of economic activity by considering a fairly high number of countries across the world (i.e. France, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Japan, Canada and Australia)...

Interest rates play a key role in free market economies. According to the Taylor rule, shortterm interest rates depend on deviations of the current inflation rate from a normative value and of the output gap. Given the difficulty of observing the output gap, we postulate that alternative...

This paper studies the revisions of the expenditure approach variables of the National Accounts, the most popular tool in macroeconomic forecasting and analysis. Preliminary figures get most attention. But how reliable are they? Generally, preliminary figures underestimate growth rates. Some...