In short term economic reports the use of different growth rate measures is misleading. This paper studies the question of using an unique measure -underlying growth-, which should be smoothed and in phase with the monthly increments of the
corresponding variable. All possible solutions require the use of forecasts at the end of the sample. The paper proposes the use of models to obtain forecasts¡ then the contemporaneous underlying growth is a model based measure. An evaluation of the effects of the last innovations in the underlying growth can be obtained by comparing its last estimation with previous one. An example of its application, based on inflation analysis, is presented
