Nowcasting Manufacturing Value Added for Cross-Country Comparison

Manufacturing Value Added (MVA) is the key indicator of a country's industrial production. In order to facilitate international comparisons it is published in UNIDO's International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics for a large set of countries. Because of a time-gap of at least one year between the latest year for which data are available and the year for which MVA data must be reported in the Yearbook, nowcasting methods are used to fill in the missing data up to the current year. We propose a methodology that exploits the relationship between MVA and GDP and produces reliable nowcasts of MVA based on figures of GDP growth rates available from external sources.