Working Paper Series no. 515: Nowcasting global economic growth: A factor-augmented mixed-frequency approach

Abstract

Facing several economic and financial uncertainties, assessing accurately global economic conditions is a great challenge for economists. The International Monetary Fund proposes within its periodic World Economic Outlook report a measure of the global GDP annual growth, that is often considered as the benchmark nowcast by macroeconomists. In this paper, we put forward an alternative approach to provide monthly nowcasts of the annual global growth rate. Our approach builds on a Factor-Augmented MIxed DAta Sampling (FA-MIDAS) model that enables (i) to account for a large monthly database including various countries and sectors of the global economy and (ii) to nowcast a low-frequency macroeconomic variable using higher-frequency information. Pseudo real-time results show that this approach provides reliable and timely nowcasts of the world GDP annual growth on a monthly basis.

Laurent Ferrara and Clément Marsilli
October 2014

Classification JEL : C53, E37

Keywords : Global growth, Nowcasting, Factor-Augmented MIDAS