The Eurosystem macroeconomic projection exercises are part of the input prepared for the Governing Council’s decision-making meetings. Under the economic analysis pillar of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy, they are a key element in the assessment of economic prospects and of the short to...

The objective of this paper is to suggest a new predictive system for international trade, based on an unobserved component model. We employ the predictive system developed by Pastor and Stambaugh (2009), which is unlike other conventional predictive regression models. This paper derives an...

Globalization has led to huge increases in import volumes, but the literature on import forecasting is still in its infancy. We introduce the first leading indicator especially constructed for total import growth, the so-called Import Climate. It builds on the idea that the import demand of the...

Russia's positive balance of trade increased in Q1 2018 reflecting an increase of exports value amid slower growth of imports deliveries. Private capital outflow was observed triggered by the growth of foreign assets of Russian enterprises amid negative geopolitical expectations

Trade in value added (TiVA) indicators are increasingly used to monitor countries' integration into global supply chains. However, they are published with a significant lag - often two or three years - which reduces their relevance for monitoring recent economic developments. This paper aims to...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...