Nowcasting China's Economic Activity with Real-time News Sentiment

November 27, 2023

Using a cutting-edge approach that incorporates at a large scale low-frequency macro-economic variables with high-frequency sentiment indicators, RavenPack is able to nowcast China's macroeconomic indicators with enhanced accuracy and timeliness.

Nowcasting models are an invaluable tool for policymakers and financial professionals, providing timely updates on key economic indicators like gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, employment, and industrial production.

Leveraging RavenPack Analytics, a state-of-the-art nowcasting model is applied to predict Chinese macroeconomic activity in real time, demonstrating its potential as a powerful forecasting tool.

Observations reveal:

  • The addition of RavenPack Analytics to the model improves performance in terms of the out-of-sample forecasting error by up to 9%, depending on the prediction period.

  • RavenPack Analytics is valuable in terms of timeliness and accuracy, particularly when there is a lack of macroeconomic data.

  • RavenPack Analytics aggregated with a decaying factor over a short horizon (30 days) provides the best contribution as recent events are emphasized.

Watch the video summary

Trade Retail Manufacturing Production GDP Sentiment Surveys Consumption Official Release NC-RP NC-B 3 10 17 24 April 1 8 15 22 29 May 3 17 10 24 31 July 5 12 19 26 June 2 16 9 October 7 21 14 28 August 4 18 11 25 September −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
The Figure shows the evolution of the 2020-Q3 YoY% GDP prediction for China based on the NC-RP model (DFM using RavenPack news signals, dark-blue line) and the NC-B model (benchmark DFM using only macroeconomic data, dark-red line). The colored bars are the contributions of the different variables to the nowcast revision related to the NC-RP model. Source: RavenPack, November 2023.



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