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  • Economist Identifies Best Measure of Global Economic Activity

    Tired of data overload? Looking for the best single measure of global economic activity in real time? After an exhaustive search, an economist at the Bank of England believes there is such a thing, and it turns out to be the export orders measure from the J.P. Morgan-sponsored Purchasing Managers Index for manufacturing.

    While the volume of information on the behavior of national and regional economies increases by the day, there is actually relatively little effort devoted to trying to keep track of activity on a planet-wide scale.

    Statistics agencies tend to be funded by national governments or regional combinations, and concerned primarily with measuring what is happening within those borders. The aggregation of their measures is time consuming, partly because they aren’t always measuring the same things in the same ways. The measures of global activity that are published often appear with very a considerable lag.

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