The 2030 Agenda and accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are vital in guiding national and global policy. However, many of the SDG indicators used to measure progress toward those goals suffer from long publication lags. Nowcasting has the potential to address this problem and...

Nowcasting can play a key role in giving policymakers timelier insight to data published with a significant time lag, such as final GDP figures. Currently, there are a plethora of methodologies and approaches for practitioners to choose from. However, there lacks a comprehensive comparison of...

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been the catalyst to numerous advances in a variety of fields and disciplines in recent years. Their impact on economics, however, has been comparatively muted.One type of ANN, the long short-term memory network (LSTM), is particularly well-suited to deal...

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the increasing need of policymakers for timely estimates of macroeconomic variables. A prior UNCTAD research paper examined the suitability of long short-term memory artificial neural networks (LSTM) for performing economic nowcasting of this nature. Here,...