Tracking economic activity during the pandemic
The standard economic indicators make real-time assessment difficult due to their time-lagged representation of economic conditions. To capture the behaviour of economic actors during the Corona pandemic with its rapidly changing conditions, a set of new high-frequency indicators is needed.
The pandemic suddenly created new economic conditions around the world. The speed of these changes made it urgent to monitor the behaviour of economic actors and their economic response to the pandemic in real time and to assess preventive measures to combat the pandemic (e.g. lockdown). Standard economic indicators are usually published with a time lag and therefore do not provide a timely understanding of economic activity. For this reason, the Centre for Economic Strategy (CES) has recently developed such an ‘activity tracker’ for Ukraine, based on non-traditional, high-frequency indicators, to provide insights into the real-time evolution of economic activity. Such trackers are new tools that can be used by policy makers for forecasting, by businesses for planning their economic activity and by consumers for a better understanding of the state of the economy.
