Nowcasting the nowcasting : Forecasting ISM Business surveys (PMI and NSI) with weekly Google trends

Abstract

Changes in economic conditions can occur suddenly with drastic effects. However, economic statistics are published with significant lags, e.g. GDP, and more timely information about the economy is required. Nowcasting methods have become widely popular for providing up-to-date information about the current economic stance. This study adds a novel idea to the previous literature by nowcasting the nowcasting, i.e. the purchasing manager’s index (PMI) and the non-manufacturing survey index (NSI) of the ISM Business survey indicators with the weekly Google Trends data. We used two-dimension reduction methods: the principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) to eliminate ‘the curse of dimensionality’. Pseudo-out-of-sample exercises performed with different Google Trends search categories indicated that Google Search data is able to generate useful information to nowcast the nowcasting. In particular, we contribute the existing literature that weekly Google Search data can nowcast the monthly PMI and NSI.