30 June 2004
Consumer Sentiment and Economic Activity Roberto Golinelli, Giuseppe Parigi
The objective of this article is to reassess the validity of the consumer confidence (or sentiment) indices in anticipating the evolution of economic activity by considering a fairly high number of countries across the world (i.e. France, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Japan, Canada and Australia) over a period of about thirty years, from the beginning of the seventies till the end of 2002 (quarterly data). To our knowledge this is the first attempt to analyse the consumer confidence index for several countries over such a long period of time. We model the CSIoutput relationship in a cointegrated vector autoregression (VAR) framework, by considering a common set of variables for all countries. Our findings suggest that: (a) what appears to be the main driving forces of consumer confidence cannot be simply summarised on the basis of ...
30 June 2004
Real-Time Tests of the Leading Economic Index Robert H. McGuckin, Ataman Ozyildirim
In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance of the LEI using growth rate forecast specifications. We contrast real-time out-of-sample tests of LEI forecasts using „composition-changing" or „as-published" versions of the LEI with those based on „composition-constant" indexes. The goal is ...
30 June 2004
Detecting Cyclical Turning Points Jacques Anas, Laurent Ferrara
The intricate issue of detecting and forecasting macroeconomic cycles turning points has been once more perfectly illustrated with the global downturn experienced by most countries around the world in 2000-2001. Governments and Central Banks are very sensitive to economic indicators showing signs of deterioration in order to adjust their policies sufficiently in advance to avoid further deterioration or even a recession. These indicators require at least two qualities: they must be reliable and they must provide a readable signal as soon as possible. In this paper, we discuss ...
30 June 2004
Markov Switching Models for GDP Growth in a Small Open Economy Robert A. Buckle, David Haugh, Peter Thomson
This paper fits Markov switching models to quarterly New Zealand aggregate GDP growth rates for the period 1978:1 to 2003:2 in order to analyse changes in mean and volatility over time. The models considered are drawn from a simple class of parsimonious, four state, Markov switching models which encompass a wide range of stationary time series behaviour from linear AR(1) models to non-linear models with persistent cycles and outliers. An overall objective is to use the models to help understand and identify changes in the historical growth performance of New Zealand's small open economy, particularly pre and post wide ranging economic reforms. Conclusions to emerge are that, in contrast to the 1980s, New Zealand GDP growth experienced an unusually long period of time in high growth and low volatility regimes since the early 1990s. In addition, New Zealand does not appear to have ...
