A nowcasting model for Ecuador: Implementing a time-varying mean output growth

Manuel González-Astudillo and Daniel Baquero

Economic Modelling, 2019, vol. 82, issue C, 250-263

Abstract: We propose a model to nowcast the annual growth rate of real GDP for Ecuador, whose economy lacks timely macroeconomic information for some key variables and has gone through unstable periods due to its dependence on oil exports. Our specification combines monthly information for 30 macroeconomic and financial variables with quarterly information for real GDP in a mixed-frequency approach. Our setup includes a time-varying coefficient on the mean annual growth rate of output to allow the model to incorporate prolonged periods of low or high growth. The model produces more accurate nowcasts of real output growth in pseudo out-of-sample exercises than a nowcasting model that assumes a constant mean real GDP growth rate. We also conduct sensitivity analyses on our nowcasting model within the time-varying mean setup and find that including financial variables can be detrimental to the performance of the proposed model.

Keywords: Nowcasting model; Time-varying coefficients; Ecuador; Secular stagnation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C53 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999318311775
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:82:y:2019:i:c:p:250-263

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2019.01.010

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().