The aim of this paper is to make a comparison between survey and time series-based estimates of capacity utilization for the Italian manufacturing sector. The comparison is focused on the actual economic crisis. Two kinds of empirical evaluation are implemented: the ability of the series to...

We build a quasi real-time leading indicator (LI) for the EU industrial production (IP). Differently from previous studies, the technique developed in this paper gives rise to an ex-ante LI that is immune to "overlapping information drawbacks". In addition, the set of variables composing the LI...