Nowcasting the Portuguese GDP with Monthly Data

In this article, we present a method to forecast the Portuguese gross domestic product (GDP) in each current quarter (nowcasting). It combines bridge equations of the real GDP on readily available monthly data like the Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI), industrial production index, cement sales or exports and imports, with forecasts for the jagged missing values computed with the well-known Hodrick and Prescott (HP) filter. As shown, this simple multivariate approach can perform as well as a Targeted Diffusion Index (TDI) model and slightly better than the univariate Theta method in terms of out-of-sample mean errors.