Euro-area and national surveys, industrial production and demand indicators are all important pieces of this constantly changing information set. Compared with GDP, these data are more timely and are available at a higher frequency.
It is not obvious, though, how to combine potentially contradictory signals coming from so many disparate sources and how to translate these signals into a quantitative assessment of the state of the economy such as that provided by GDP growth (see Figure 2). At the end of the day, “economy watchers” and forecasters rely on their judgment to perform this “weighting task”.