Nowcasting manufacturing value added for cross-country comparison

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Boudt, Kris | Todorov, Valentin | Upadhyaya, Shyam

Affiliations: K.U. Leuven and Lessius University College, Naamsestraat 69, 3000 Leuven, Belgium | Research and Statistics Branch, UNIDO, P.O. Box 300, A-1400 Vienna, Austria

Note: [] Corresponding author. Tel.: +32 16 32 6728; Fax: +32 16 32 6624; E-mail: kris.boudt@econ.kuleuven.be

Abstract: Manufacturing Value Added (MVA) is the key indicator of a country's industrial production. In order to facilitate international comparisons it is published in UNIDO's International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics for a large set of countries. Because of a time-gap of at least one year between the latest year for which data are available and the year for which MVA data must be reported in the Yearbook, nowcasting methods are used to fill in the missing data up to the current year. We propose a parsimonious methodology that exploits the relationship between MVA and GDP to produce reliable nowcasts of MVA.

Keywords: Manufacturing Value Added, nowcasting, robustness, UNIDO

DOI: 10.3233/SJI-2009-0694

Journal: Statistical Journal of the IAOS, vol. 26, no. 1-2, pp. 15-20, 2009