Evaluation and development of confidence indicators based on harmonised business and consumer surveys (Study contracted to IFO, Munich).

The Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) conducts a number of surveys within the framework of the Joint Harmonised EU Programme of Business and Consumer Surveys. This programme was launched in 1962 with the industrial survey, and since then there has been a spectacular growth of business and consumer surveys in the EU. At present five surveys are conducted on a monthly basis: Industry, Consumers, Retail Trade, Construction and Service Sector. In addition, twice a year data for a harmonised investment survey is collected and published. Finally, the quarterly EconomicSurvey International (ESI) provides us with an assessment of the world-wide economic situation by 500 experts in 60 countries.All indicators must be revised from time to time in order to validate their explanatory properties. Therefore, structural economic changes demand periodic revisions of the indicators in order to explain the economic reality.This study contracted to IFO shows that although there is some room for improvement, the current indicators still seem to be quite adequate. The study contains four main suggestions which will be extensively tested by DG ECFIN in order to evaluate the convenience of adopting each one of them for an eventual overhaul of the Economic Sentiment Indicator in the near future.Industry, Consumers, Retail Trade, Construction, Service Sector, IFO study

Heuristic Model Selection for Leading Indicators in Russia and Germany

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognized as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified and estimated to construct forecasts. As the potential number of lags included is large, we compare full's specified VAR models with subset models obtained using a Genetic Algorithm enabling in multivariate lag structures. The problem is complicated by the fact that a structural break and seasonal variation of indicators have to be taken into account. The models allow for a comparison of the dynamic adjustment and the forecasting performance of the leading indicators for both countries revealing marked differences between Russia and Germany

Beschaeftigung und Arbeitsproduktivitaet im Verarbeitenden Gewerbe alte Bundeslaender, Herbst 1994 - Unternehmensbefragung

IAB / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Early Experience on Running OpenStaPLE on DAVIDE

In this contribution we measure the computing and energy performance of the recently developed DAVIDE HPC-cluster, a massively parallel machine based on IBM POWER CPUs and NVIDIA Pascal GPUs. We use as an application benchmark the OpenStaPLE Lattice QCD code, written using the OpenACC programming framework. Our code exploits the computing performance of GPUs through the use of OpenACC directives, and uses OpenMPI to manage the parallelism among several GPUs. We analyze the speed-up and the aggregate performance of the code, and try to identify possible bottlenecks that harm performances. Using the power monitor tools available on DAVIDE we also discuss some energy aspects pointing out the best trade-offs between time-to-solution and energy-to-solution

Gesamtwirtschaftliche Beurteilung von CO_2 Minderungsstrategien

In Germany, a comprehensive pogramme was launched in the past years for the purpose of achieving a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2005 as compared to the reference year 1990. The catalogue of measures ranges from legal regulations to economic incentives and to information and consulting. This investigation investigates the reduction effects to be expected from these measures as well as the sectoral and general economic cost effects. The interdependences between clean air policy on the one hand and sectoral and general economic goals like acceptable economic growth, stable prices and a level foreign trade balance are to be defined. (orig./RHM)In Deutschland wurde in den letzten Jahren ein umfassendes Minderungsprogramm auf den Weg gebracht, mit dem eine Verringerung der CO_2-Emissionen bis zum Jahr 2005 gegenueber 1990 um 25 vH erreicht werden soll; das Massnahmenbuendel reicht von ordnungsrechtlichen Ge- und Verboten ueber oekonomische Anreize bis hin zu Information und Aufklaerung. Die vorliegende Untersuchung stellt die mit diesem Massnahmenkatalog verbundenen Reduktionswirkungen wie auch die sektoralen und gesamtwirtschaftlichen Kostenimpulse im Detail dar. Ziel ist es, den Zusammenhang zwischen Klimaschutzpolitik einerseits, sektoralen und gesamtwirtschaftlichen Zielen wie angemessenes Wirtschaftswachstum, stabiles Preisniveau oder aussenwirtschaftliches Gleichgewicht andererseits sichtbar zu machen. (orig./RHM)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 2401(19) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Die ifo Konjunkturuhr: Zirkulare Korrelation mit dem realen Bruttoinlandsprodukt

Ifo Geschäftsklima, Konjunkturuhr, Konjunkturmonitor, Zirkulare Korrelation, Linear-zirkulare Korrelation, Temporale Disaggregation, E32, C32, C39, C22, Ifo business climate, Business cycle clock, Business cycle monitor, Circular correlation, Linear-circular correlation, Temporal disaggregation,