1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

Anglais, Français

Forecasting Monthly GDP for Canada

The objective of this paper is to develop a short-term indicator-based model to predict quarterly GDP in Canada by efficiently exploiting all available monthly information. To this aim, monthly forecasting equations are estimated using the GDP series published every month by Statistics Canada as well as other monthly indicators. The procedures are automated and the model can be run whenever major monthly data are released, allowing the appropriate choice of the model according to the information set available. The most important gain from this procedure is for the current-quarter forecast when one or two months of GDP data are available, with all monthly models estimated in the paper outperforming a standard quarterly autoregressive model in terms of size of errors. The use of indicators also appears to improve forecasting performance, especially when an average of indicator-based models is used. Real-time forecasting performance of the average model appear to be good, with an apparent stability of the estimates from one update to the next, despite the extensive use of monthly data. The latter result should nonetheless be interpreted with caution and will need to be re-assessed when more data become available.

Anglais

Mots-clés: monthly GDP, indicator models, real-time estimations, Canada, short-term forecasts
JEL: E37: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles / Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications; C52: Mathematical and Quantitative Methods / Econometric Modeling / Model Evaluation, Validation, and Selection; C53: Mathematical and Quantitative Methods / Econometric Modeling / Forecasting and Prediction Methods; Simulation Methods
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error