ITER: A Quarterly Indicator of Regional Economic Activity in Italy

• Published in: Italian economic journal Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 129 - 147
• Main Authors: Di Giacinto, Valter, Monteforte, Libero, Filippone, Andrea, Montaruli, Francesco, Ropele, Tiziano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01-03-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Economic activity; Economic theory; Economics; Economics and Finance; European Integration; GDP; Gross Domestic Product; Regions; Research Paper - Italy and Europe; Italy; Temporal disaggregation of time series; Real time estimates; C22; C82; Regional economies benchmarking and extrapolation; C61
• ISSN: 2199-322X; 2199-3238
• DOI: 10.1007/s40797-020-00131-2

This work documents the construction of the new quarterly indicator of regional economic activity (
Indicatore Trimestrale dell’Economia Regionale
—ITER), which uses a parsimonious set of regional variables and combines them by means of temporal disaggregation techniques to obtain a quarterly index that is consistent with the official data on national and regional GDP and marked by a small lag compared with the reference period. The methodology was implemented to produce quarterly indicators for the economies of Italy’s four macro-areas in the period 1995–2017. With a view to assessing the performance of the quarterly indicator, a forecasting exercise was conducted regarding annual GDP growth in the four macro-areas for the period 2014–17. The forecasting performance of ITER is in line with that of the indicators developed by other national research institutions.