Point and interval nowcasts of the Euro area IPI

Abstract

Opinion surveys are an important element in the analysis of the short-term economic situation because of the timeliness and nature of the information they convey. The aim of this article is to propose a procedure to nowcast in real-time the fluctuations of the industrial production indices (IPI) for the aggregated euro area, by incorporating the information contained in the industrial opinion surveys. We present a pooling procedure, each nowcasted value stemming from a calibration model. The confidence intervals for IPI nowcasts are computed by bootstrap.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank D. Guégan, E. Ruiz and all the participants of the international workshop on ‘New Developments on Forecasting Methods’ organized at the ENS-Cachan in February 2005, as well as J. Anas at COE for helpful discussions.

Notes

¹ We use here the official IPI data set released by Eurostat on 15 February 2005.