The creation of the Euro area has increased the importance of obtaining timely information about short-term changes in the area's real activity. In this paper we propose a number of alternative short-term forecasting models, ranging from simple ARIMA models to more complex cointegrated VAR and...

This paper proposes a simple procedure to obtain monthly assessments of short-run perspectives for quarterly world GDP and trade. It combines emerging and advanced countries� high frequency information to explain quarterly national accounts variables through bridge models. The union of all...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...

The creation of the Euro area has increased the importance of obtaining timely information about short-term changes in the area's real activity. In this paper we propose a number of alternative short-term forecasting models, ranging from simple ARIMA models to more complex cointegrated VAR and...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

The paper examines the evolution of consumer confidence indices in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America since the 1970s, by modelling them in a multivariate framework of common macroeconomic variables for each country. Results...

We examine the impact of four factors on the fiscal policies of the euro-area countries over the last two decades: the state of public finances, the European fiscal rules, cyclical conditions and general elections. We rely on information actually available to policy-makers at the time of...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...

From a theoretical point of view, uncertainty over the demand for a firm�s product may not have clear effects on investments, because of the influence of a number of factors, such as the production technology and the amount of competition in the product market.Until now, a deeper...

Quantitative information on the current state of the economy is crucial to economic policy-making, but the quarterly national accounts data for GDP in the euro area are released with a significant delay. This paper presents alternative models for the real-time forecasting of euro area GDP and...