Signals about multiple facets of the economy can be aggregated to infer a timely picture of the macro economy. “maritime transport”, “agricultural equipment”) as well as economic sentiment (e.g. “real estate agency”, “mortgage”), business services (e.g.“venture capital”, “bankruptcy”), industrial activity (e.g. related to searches for “vehicles”, “households appliances”), labour markets (e.g.“recruitment”), housing (e.g. Data about search behaviour can be informative about consumption (e.g. What makes Google Trends a powerful tool for economic predictions is its coverage of a large number of aspects of economic activity. To the author’s knowledge, the Tracker is the first weekly GDP proxy that covers such a large array of OECD and G20 countries.

The OECD Economic Outlook (OECD, 2020) as well as a recent OECD paper ( Woloszko, 2020) discuss one such indicator based on Google Trends, which are used to construct a Weekly Tracker that provides real-time estimates of GDP growth in 46 economies covering G20, OECD and OECD partner countries. Given that GDP is usually only available on a quarterly basis and that monthly survey-based indicators (such as the Purchasing Managers’ Indices) can become unreliable when changes in economic activity are abrupt and massive, the current crisis has prompted a search for alternative high‑frequency indicators of economic activity. By Nicolas Woloszko, OECD Economics DepartmentĪ pre-requisite for good macroeconomic policymaking is timely information on the current state of the economy, particularly when economic activity is changing rapidly.

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