A Leading Index for the Colombian Economic Activity
La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.
In this paper, we propose a methodology for calculating a leading index of the economic activity based on a modification of Stock and Watson’s (1989, 1991, 1992) approach. We use Kalman filter techniques for estimating the state space representation of the leading index model. The methodology is applied to the Colombian economy and the resulting index leads six months the Melo et al. (2002) coincident index (in semi-annual growth rates). As an intermediate result, we also develop an updating process of the coincident index.
