Forecasting the industrial production using alternative factor models and business survey data

Abstract

This paper compares the forecasting performance of three alternative factor models based on business survey data for the industrial production in Italy. The first model uses static principal component analysis, while the other two apply dynamic principal component analysis in frequency domain and subspace algorithms for state-space representation, respectively. Once the factors are extracted from the business survey data, then they are included into a single equation to predict the industrial production index. The forecast results show that the three factor models have a better performance than that of a simple autoregressive benchmark model regardless of the specification and estimation methods. Furthermore, the state-space model yields superior forecasts amongst the factor models.