Nowcasting Economic Activity in Times of COVID-19: An Approximation from the Google Community Mobility Report
James Sampi, Charl Jooste
Abstract
This paper proposes a leading indicator, \n the "Google Mobility Index," for nowcasting \n monthly industrial production growth rates in selected \n economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The index is \n constructed using the Google COVID-19 Community Mobility \n Report database via a Kalman filter. The Google database is \n publicly available starting from February 15, 2020. The \n paper uses a backcasting methodology to increase the \n historical number of observations and then augments a lag of \n one week in the mobility data with other high-frequency data \n (air quality) over January 1, 2019 to April 30, 2020. \n Finally, mixed data sampling regression is implemented for \n nowcasting industrial production growth rates. The Google \n Mobility Index is a good predictor of industrial production. \n The results suggest a significant decline in output of \n between 5 and 7 percent for March and April, respectively, \n while indicating a trough in output in mid-April.