Nowcasting GDP with Digital Payments: Evidence from Uganda

Andrea Panozzo, Lorenzo Spadavecchia, Adam Mugume, Elizabeth Kasekende, Samuel Namwanja Musoke, Mariss Nakayaga, Deo Sande, Anita Mpagi, Nzima Ghislain

No 26282, BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers from BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy

Abstract: In developing economies, output statistics arrive with long lags and omit a large informal sector, while digital payment systems record a growing share of transactions in near real time. We assess whether these records improve GDP nowcasts in Uganda, exploiting two national systems that observe complementary segments of the economy: Mobile Money, covering retail and informal transactions, and real-time gross settlement (RTGS), covering large-value formal payments. Within a pseudo-real-time design respecting each series’ publication lag, we augment a conventional macroeconomic panel with payment data across linear and machinelearning models. Payment data cut forecast errors by up to 16 percent and rank among the most informative predictors, with up to over three times the weight of a typical macroeconomic indicator. The improvement delivered by payment data is robust to macroeconomic disturbances, such as the COVID-19 contraction. Placebo tests attribute these gains to economic content, not added predictors. Already held by central banks, payment data offer a timely, low-cost input for surveillance where conventional statistics are weakest.

Keywords: Nowcasting; Digital payments; Mobile money; RTGS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 E37 G21 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/baffic/baf/papers/cbafwp26282.pdf (application/pdf)

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:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp26282

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers from BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy Via Röntgen, 1 - 20136 Milano - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michela Pozzi ().