TY  - JOUR
AU  - Baumeister, Christiane
AU  - Guérin, Pierre
TI  - A Comparison of Monthly Global Indicators for Forecasting Growth
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 28014
PY  - 2020
Y2  - October 2020
DO  - 10.3386/w28014
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w28014
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w28014.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Christiane Baumeister
Department of Economics
University of Notre Dame
3028 Jenkins Nanovic Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Tel: 574/631-8450
E-Mail: cbaumeis@nd.edu

Pierre Guerin
International Monetary Fund
700 19th St NW
Washington, DC 20431
E-Mail: pguerin@imf.org
AB  - This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy consistently produces substantial improvements in forecast accuracy, while other monthly measures have more mixed success. This global economic conditions indicator contains valuable information also for assessing the current and future state of the economy for a set of individual countries and groups of countries. We use this indicator to track the evolution of the nowcasts for the US, the OECD area, and the world economy during the coronavirus pandemic and quantify the main factors driving the nowcasts.
ER  -