The European Statistics Awards for Nowcasting: A New Approach to Engage with the Scientific Community and to Foster Improved Timeliness of Official Statistics

Abstract

The European Statistics Awards Programme is a multiannual program for engaging with, and tapping into the potential of, the research and innovation community at large. This is achieved through competitions with pecuniary prizes for the best performers. One of the strands within that program offers awards for the accurate nowcasting of monthly time series of interest to policymakers. This paper presents the design of the nowcasting competition as well as the performance of the best entries of the first annual round. In terms of accuracy, the competition has generated promising results—which do however need further fine-tuning before being possible to deploy in statistical production. The competitions feature a particular prize for submissions having a potential for scaling up to regular statistical production—and in response to this, teams have submitted ample documentation (including code). The awards program should also generate experience that the official statistics community can learn from. This paper demonstrates how the multi-annual nature of the program has allowed various design changes to be implemented for the last nowcasting round. The main work now lies ahead: the paper outlines the plans for further developing the most promising competition contributions, potentially leading to new Eurostat experimental statistics products.