Banco de Portugal: economic activity continues to mark the week ended March 27
The daily indicator of economic activity, which depicts in almost real time the evolution of the Portuguese economy, in the week ended on March 27, for a reduction in economic activity compared to the previous week, informed this Thursday, March 31, the Bank of Portugal (BdP).
“In the week ended March 27, the daily economic activity indicator (DEI) points to a lower year-on-year assessment rate of activity observed in the previous week,” the BdP said in a statement.
The DEI is an indicator launched by the BdP to identify abrupt changes in economic activity, but it is not an official forecast by the Bank of Portugal or the Eurosystem.
Published weekly on Thursday, with information up to the previous Sunday, the DEI covers several dimensions correlated with economic activity on the road in Portugal, summarizing information on the main news: road traffic of commercial vehicles on the following highways, electricity and gas consumption natural, cargo and mail landed at national airports and purchases made with cards in Portugal by residents and non-residents.
As the BdP explains, the use of this type of high-frequency data “intensified following the crisis triggered by the covid-19 pandemic”, since, given the “short lag” of its disclosure compared to the reference period, allowed “timely identify sudden changes in economic activity”.
The DEI is normalized so that its quarterly average has the same average and standard deviation of the quarterly record rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in recent years and, in addition to the daily indicator, the centered moving average of seven days at a daily frequency in order to mitigate any irregularity present in the daily series.
Since the recent evolution of the DEI is “strongly influenced by the base effects resulting from the events that took place during 2020 and 2021, which significantly affects the year-on-year evolution of activity in 2021 and 2022”, the central bank also discloses the evolution of the triennial rate, in order to mitigate the influence of base effects by accumulating the collection, in homologous days, for a period of three years.