For the third quarter of 2019, Erasmus School of Economics finds an economic growth of 2.0%, compared with the same quarter last year. This is calculated with the ‘Econometric Institute Current Indicator of the Economy’ (EICIE) which has been renewed.
The EICIE is an indicator for the current position of the economy, using machine learning techniques and sentiment variables. In contrast to the CBS, who give a first impression after 45 days, the EICIE gives updates during the term.
As an example: in the first quarter of 2019 EICIE predicted an economic growth of 1.6% compared with the same quarter last year. CBS published that the growth had been 1.9% for that term on Tuesday 14 May 2019. For the second quarter EICIE predicted a growth of 2.0%, which turned out to be exact the same as the number CBS published.
The new version of the EICIE is based on the input collected from 1.4 million articles from the NRC Handelsblad. Relevant words and short sentences are coded a summarized into variables. A neural network with five layers is used to relate economic growth to sentiment.
With a growth of only 2.0% the Dutch growth seems to stay at the same level as last quarter.
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