A nowcasting model for Ecuador: Implementing a time-varying mean output growth

Abstract

We propose a model to nowcast the annual growth rate of real GDP for Ecuador, whose economy lacks timely macroeconomic information for some key variables and has gone through unstable periods due to its dependence on oil exports. Our specification combines monthly information for 30 macroeconomic and financial variables with quarterly information for real GDP in a mixed-frequency approach. Our setup includes a time-varying coefficient on the mean annual growth rate of output to allow the model to incorporate prolonged periods of low or high growth. The model produces more accurate nowcasts of real output growth in pseudo out-of-sample exercises than a nowcasting model that assumes a constant mean real GDP growth rate. We also conduct sensitivity analyses on our nowcasting model within the time-varying mean setup and find that including financial variables can be detrimental to the performance of the proposed model.