Algunes reflexions sobre la construccio d'indicadors indirectes pel seguiment de l'activitat industrial regional

In a big amount of economies the evolution of the manufacturing production is analysed using Gross Domestic Product and/or Gross Added Value data from National Accounts. In Spain, the problem of using these data is that they are not available as soon as it would be desirable. In consequence, it is not possible to analyse the short-term evolution of the industrial output through them. To solve these problems, the Institute of Statistics of Spain constructs a monthly Industrial Production Index from data belonging to a survey addressed to firms. However, at a regional level, the difficulties to monitor the evolution of manufacturing production are even bigger due to the nearly absence of regular data. During the last years, different public and private institutions have started to construct indices for some Spanish regions, but they do not use homogeneous methodologies and as a consequence their indices are not directly comparable. To correct this situation, in different forums it has been proposed to use the methodology of the regional Institute of Statistics of Catalonia (Institut dEstadistica de Catalunya -IEC-) as an alternative for the Spanish regions that do not have an index of manufacturing production, due to its adequacy for Catalonia. In this paper we study the possibility of extending this methodology to the rest of the Spanish regions. To validate this approximation, we compare the indices elaborated following the IECs methodology with the regional indices obtained by direct methods for three of the four regions where they exist: Andalucia, Asturias and Euskadi.