The objective of this project is to propose a unified statistical analysis of business cycles in European national statistical offices.

Our aims are to:
(1) review and evaluate the main techniques available;
(2) survey the practitioners needs and practices;
(3) customize the most satisfying techniques in order to match the practitioners requirements;
(4) organize the different steps of a typical analysis, making available a range of algorithms at all steps;
(5) implement the overall scheme in a prototype software;
(6) and to disseminate the software tool.

Emphasis will be put on statistical properties, on method reliability, and on how suited is every method to the case of European economies and to the data typically available in NSI's. The investigation will balance theoretical and practical considerations, fundamental analysis and empirical experience.

Objectives:
The objective of the project is to review, evaluate, and customize advanced statistical techniques for business cycle analysis and to make them available for routine use in NSI. The final aim is to implement a software tool able to guide official statisticians through the main steps of a standard business cycle analysis, in an organized and informative way, so as to help in improving the knowledge of cycles in EU economies.

Work description:
Since our aim is to ease the practice of business cycle analysis in official statistics, a careful reviewing of the main techniques, evaluating their performances and comparing their advantages and drawbacks is a necessary first step. That review must also include practical considerations, with an exhaustive description of the practitioner uses and constraints. It will then be possible to work out a set of candidate approaches that could be followed by European official statisticians. At that stage prototype software will be designed for implementing the different procedures selected.

The project is made up of 8 work-packages detailed below:
the Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety of the EC Joint Research Centre will be the scientific coordinator.
ISIS' s large experience in technology transfer, software development, and support to statistical institutions will insure an efficient scientific management:
WP1. Reviewing and evaluating statistical methods and procedures related to dating;
WP2. Reviewing and evaluating statistical methods and procedures related to building composite indexes (leading/coincident/lagging);
WP3. Reviewing and evaluating statistical methods and procedures related to forecasting the state of the economy;
WP4. Methods in official statistics - the practitioner side;
WP5. Profiling and standardizing;
WP6. Prototype software;
WP7. Administrative management;
WP8. Scientific supervision and co-ordination, validation, dissemination plan.

Milestones:
M11: Complete overview of statistical methods and procedures available at every step of a typical business cycle analysis;
M17 Software profile;
M34 Software implementation;
M35 User manual and final report.