Output Gaps and Cyclical Indicator

Werner Roeger, Kieran Mc Morrow, Atanas Hristov and Valerie Vandermeulen

No 104, European Economy - Discussion Papers from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission

Abstract: Questions have recently been raised on the usefulness of output gaps (which define the cyclical position of a country) for policymaking purposes. Whilst these questions are important in raising awareness concerning the uncertainty which inevitably surrounds an unobservable variable such as the output gap, we believe that the discussions are sometimes neglectful of the empirical evidence with respect to the performance of specific business cycle indicators. The current article therefore assesses the empirical performance of the most widely used business cycle indicators in output gap analysis, with a significant proportion of the recent criticism on the economic plausibility of output gaps drawing heavily on specific inflation indicators (such as headline or core inflation) or on indicators of external imbalances. The empirical evidence in this article shows that these inflation and external balance indicators do not perform well as indicators of the cycle and consequently should be used with caution by policy makers.

JEL-codes: E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/ ... clical-indicators_en (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:euf:dispap:104

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in European Economy - Discussion Papers from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECFIN INFO ().