Affiliations: K.U. Leuven and Lessius University College,
Naamsestraat 69, 3000 Leuven, Belgium | Research and Statistics Branch, UNIDO, P.O. Box 300,
A-1400 Vienna, Austria
Abstract: Manufacturing Value Added (MVA) is the key indicator of a country's
industrial production. In order to facilitate international comparisons it is
published in UNIDO's International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics for a
large set of countries. Because of a time-gap of at least one year between the
latest year for which data are available and the year for which MVA data must
be reported in the Yearbook, nowcasting methods are used to fill in the missing
data up to the current year. We propose a parsimonious methodology that
exploits the relationship between MVA and GDP to produce reliable nowcasts of
MVA.
Keywords: Manufacturing Value Added, nowcasting, robustness, UNIDO