NA/50 Quality improvement of the Dutch Quarterly Flash: A Time Series Analysis of some Service Industries

Reininga, Ted and Gerrit Zijlmans (1992).The Dutch Quarterly Flash (QF) is, just like the regular Quarterly Accounts (QA), a fully integrated statistic based on a quarterly updated input-output table. Not all short term statistics used to update the QA's input-output are timely enough to be of use for the QF, so other sources have to be found or forecasts have to be made. In large parts of the service industry the latter is the only possibility. This paper reports on the use of econometric techniques (viz. series decomposition and ARIMA modelling) to improve the quality of the forecasts in five parts of the service industry.