UAM-UCM Spanish Economic Composite Indicators

The UAM-UCM Spanish Leading and Coincident Economic Indicators are designed to track Spanish real business conditions at monthly frequency. In the case of the leading indicator, CLI, its underlying (non-seasonally adjusted) economic indicators (car registrations, housing starts, cement consumption and commercial vehicle registrations) include monthly information available at the time of updating the CLI each month. In the case of the coincident indicator, CCINofuel, its underlying indicators include air traffic passengers, electricity consumption, workers in the SS system and the manufacturing IPI. Both indexes and this web page are updated as data on the indexes’ underlying components are released.

How to read the graphs

Dots of different colors are included in the main graphs to facilitate their interpretation. Purple color indicates local maxima (turning point) while green color indicates local minima (turning point). Grey dots indicate confirmation of recession while blue color indicates the beginning of a new expansion period. Precise definitions of expansion and recession periods are defined in García-Ferrer and Bujosa-Brun (2000). The dates of the different colors at the bottom left side of the graphs indicate the last dates of these events. The graphs in the main page are shown without transformation to be compatible with original definitions. However, we have also plotted the normalized CLI and CCINofuel indexes (more comparative graphs) to make comparisons between them an interpretable alternative. In this case, the average values of the CCINofuel and CLI indexes are zero. Progressively bigger positive values indicate better-than-average conditions, whereas progressively more negative values indicate worse-than-average conditions. Both the CCINofuel and CLI may be used to compare the current state of the business conditions at different times. In “Historical Information”, we can observe the state of the main index (and its components) starting in 1982 until the time of the present update. At each point in time, we use information available at that precise point in time but not the full sample. A value of -3.5 in the CCINofuel, for example, would indicate business conditions significantly worse than at any time of the previous Spanish recessions, during which the CCINofuel index never dropped below -2.0.