IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rba/rbardp/rdp9102.html

Indicators of Economic Activity: A Review

Author

Listed:
  • Malcolm Edey

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

  • Jill Pleban

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

Abstract

This paper reviews the performance of a selection of indicators that are in common use in analysing the business cycle. The analysis proceeds in two stages, looking first at relationships between major expenditure aggregates and GDP, and then looking at the extent to which partial indicators contain useful leading information about particular expenditure aggregates. Results on the first issue show a tendency for housing activity to lead the cycle, while construction and consumption expenditure probably lag. However, these relationships are not very reliable, in the sense that timing can vary significantly from cycle to cycle. On the second issue, the usefulness of a number of partial indicators is confirmed. The most significant in providing leading information are probably local government building approvals and the ANZ job vacancies series.

Suggested Citation

  • Malcolm Edey & Jill Pleban, 1991. "Indicators of Economic Activity: A Review," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp9102, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    • Handle: RePEc:rba:rbardp:rdp9102
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/1991/pdf/rdp9102.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert G. Trevor & Stephen G. Donald, 1986. "Leading Indexes – Do They?," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp8604, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    2. Thornton, Daniel L & Batten, Dallas S, 1985. "Lag-Length Selection and Tests of Granger Causality between Money and Income," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 17(2), pages 164-178, May.
    3. Glenn Stevens & Susan Thorp, 1989. "The Relationship between Financial Indicators and Economic Activity: Some Further Evidence," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp8903, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    4. Paul Brennan & Tania Milavec, 1988. "The Relationship between Actual Investment and Survey-based Expectations," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp8810, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J.D. Hollingworth, 1997. "Leading Indicators of Australian Recessions: Part 2," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 97-17, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.
    2. C. O'Sullivan, 1993. "What Everyone Needs to Know About the Australian Business Cycle," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 93-21, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jani Bekő, 2003. "Causality between exports and economic growth: empirical estimates for slovenia," Prague Economic Papers, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2003(2), pages 169-186.
    2. Kocenda, Evzen & Hanousek, Jan & Engelmann, Dirk, 2008. "Currencies, competition, and clans," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 30(6), pages 1115-1132.
    3. Fuinhas, José Alberto & Marques, António Cardoso & Nogueira, David Coito, 2014. "Análise VAR dos índices bolsistas SP500, FTSE100, PSI20, HSI e IBOVESPA [Integration of the indexes SP500, FTSE100, PSI20, HSI and IBOVESPA: A VAR approach]," MPRA Paper 62092, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 10 Feb 2015.
    4. Dallas S. Batten & Daniel L. Thornton, 1985. "Weighted monetary aggregates as intermediate targets," Working Papers 1985-010, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    5. Michaelides, Panayotis & Milios, John, 2009. "TFP change, output gap and inflation in the Russian Federation (1994-2006)," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 61(4), pages 339-352, July.
    6. Robert A. Weigand, 1996. "Trading volume and firm size: A test of the information spillover hypothesis," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 5(1), pages 47-58, December.
    7. Tsangyao Chang & Yuan-Hong Ho, 2002. "A Note on Testing ¡°Tax-and-Spend, Spend-and-Tax or Fiscal Synchronization¡±: The Case of China," Journal of Economic Development, Chung-Ang Unviersity, Department of Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 151-160, June.
    8. Michaelides, Panayotis G. & Milios, John G. & Konstantakis, Konstantinos N. & Tarnaras, Panayiotis, 2015. "Quantity-of-money fluctuations and economic instability: empirical evidence for the USA (1958–2006)," MPRA Paper 90145, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Jung, Young Cheol & Das, Anupam & McFarlane, Adian, 2020. "The asymmetric relationship between the oil price and the US-Canada exchange rate," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 198-206.
    10. Aaltonen, J. & Östermark, R., 1997. "A rolling test of granger causality between the Finnish and Japanese security markets," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 25(6), pages 635-642, December.
    11. Qazi Masood Ahmed & Mohammad Sabihuddin Butt & Shaista Alam, 2000. "Economic Growth, Export, and External Debt Causality: The Case of Asian Countries," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 39(4), pages 591-608.
    12. Maier, Philipp & Sturm, Jan-Egbert & de Haan, Jakob, 2002. "Political pressure on the Bundesbank: an empirical investigation using the Havrilesky approach," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 103-123, March.
    13. Michael T. Belongia, 1991. "Monetary policy and the farm/nonfarm price ratio: a comparison of effects," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jul, pages 30-46.
    14. Hirukawa, Junichi & Raïssi, Hamdi, 2020. "Testing linear relationships between non-constant variances of economic variables," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 182-189.
    15. Lukasz Marc, 2014. "The Causal Links between Aid and Government Expenditures," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 14-012/V, Tinbergen Institute.
    16. Nikeel Nishkar Kumar & Arvind Patel & Navneel Shalendra Prasad & Shayal Nandani, 2023. "Loss aversion or hand-to-mouth behaviour in private consumption models," New Zealand Economic Papers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(3), pages 247-259, September.
    17. Rik Hafer & Scott E. Hein, 1986. "Federal government debt and inflation: evidence from Granger causality tests," Working Papers 1986-003, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    18. Saungweme, Talknice & Odhiambo, Nicholas M, 2019. "Causality between public debt, public debt service and economic growth: Evidence from South Africa," Working Papers 25745, University of South Africa, Department of Economics.
    19. Gerardo Licandro, 2000. "Is Mercosur an Optimal Currency Area? A shock correlation perspective," Documentos de trabajo 2000004, Banco Central del Uruguay.
    20. Michaelides, Panayotis G. & Papageorgiou, Theofanis, 2012. "On the transmission of economic fluctuations from the USA to EU-15 (1960–2011)," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 64(6), pages 427-438.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rba:rbardp:rdp9102. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Paula Drew (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rbagvau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.