A data-driven approach for building macroeconomic decision support system

More and more economic and financial data have been collected by the governmental departments in China since China started its “socialist market economy” in late 1980s. These government departments, in particular the departments in charge of economic development, pay a great attention to the economic information in their decision-making. There is an urgent demand for efficient decision support systems in macroeconomic decision-making. In this paper we present a data-driven approach for building macroeconomic decision support system. We first give a comprehensive discussion about the basic elements and their data-processing methods for Macroeconomic Decision Support Systems according to China's situation. These elements include: leading indicator system about business cycle, state identification of economic movement, forecasting of economic trend, promotion of successful cases, choice of regulation instruments, evaluation method of macroeconomic policies. Based on the discussion, we put forward to a general structure of macroeconomic decision support system. Premier implementation shows that the structure can not only satisfy the governmental departments' demand fairly, but also reflect the future trend.