Composite global indicators from survey data: the Global Economic Barometers

Abstract

This paper presents a coincident and a leading composite monthly indicator for the world business cycle—the Global Economic Barometers. Both target the world’s output growth rate and consist of economic tendency surveys results from many countries around the world. The calculation of these indicators comprises two main stages. The first consists of a variable selection procedure, in which a pre-set correlation threshold and the targeted leads to the reference series are used as selection criteria. In the second stage, the selected variables are combined and transformed into the respective composite indicators, computed as the first partial least squares factor with the reference series as response variable. We analyse the characteristics of the two new indicators in a pseudo real-time setting and demonstrate that both are useful additions to the small number of indicators for the global business cycle published so far. Finally, yet importantly, the Barometers were quick to plunge in the beginning of March 2020 and have since then given a reliable real-time reflection of the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Algorithm for assessing the business activity of the region in the decision-making system at the regional management level

“…The rationale for using the business activity of the region as an indicator of the regional system state required the analysis of scientific works by leading scientists who developed scientific approaches to assessing business activity at various management levels -the individual level, micro-level, macro-level, meso-level [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

“…At the same time, complex systems are in a constant process of change: the stage of stable functioning can go into a stage of uncertainty, the system can be in the functioning development, and then transform into a shrinking system [10], therefore, characteristics of trends, dynamics are often used to assess their state [11], reflecting the transition from one stage to another, the transition from one state to another state.…”

Imputing Monthly Values for Quarterly Time Series. An Application Performed with Swiss Business Cycle Data

“…This approach is used, for example, in Schumacher and Breitung (2008) for imputation of missing values in monthly and quarterly German economic data. Since September 2015, the EM procedure is applied for temporal disaggregation of the quarterly components of the composite leading economic indicator (KOF Economic Barometer) for the Swiss economy (see Abberger et al, 2018) and since January 2020 for the Global Barometers (see Abberger et al, 2022).…”

The Autonomous Capacity of the Elderly Population in Spain for Shopping and Preparing Meals

“…[ 26 ] discussed the importance of assigning weights to individual measures in the construction of a composite indicator, an aspect which is crucial for improving the aggregation of these measures. Likewise, in different studies, such as [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ], different methods of aggregation were compared. Lastly, in [ 37 ] the problem of presenting the composite indicators as a single figure was analysed and the construction of their confidence intervals was proposed.…”