Glossary · worldstat.us

Every acronym and term of art used on worldstat.us, with what it means and where it appears. Hovering a dotted term anywhere on the site shows the short version; this page has the long one.

Publishers and institutions

ONS Office for National Statistics: The United Kingdom's national statistical office, publisher of its GDP, inflation and labour-market figures.
BIS Bank for International Settlements: The central banks' bank in Basel, which publishes credit-to-GDP gaps and debt service ratios for every large economy.
ECB European Central Bank: The central bank of the euro area; its data portal supplies yield curves, loan growth, the deposit rate and the CISS stress index.
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: A club of 38 mostly rich economies whose statistics arm publishes the composite leading indicators used in every region here.
FRED Federal Reserve Economic Data: The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's database of more than 800,000 series, the source of most US data here.
BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics: The US agency that publishes the unemployment rate and the consumer price index.
BEA Bureau of Economic Analysis: The US agency that publishes GDP and the national accounts.
Eurostat Statistical office of the European Union: The EU's statistical office, publisher of euro-area inflation, unemployment, GDP and the Economic Sentiment Indicator.
NBS National Bureau of Statistics of China: China's statistical agency, publisher of GDP, consumer prices and the official manufacturing PMI.
MoF Ministry of Finance, Japan: Japan's finance ministry, which publishes the daily reference yields on government bonds used for the Japanese yield curve here.
OFR Office of Financial Research, US Treasury: A US Treasury office created after 2008 to monitor financial stability; it publishes a daily financial stress index.
Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve System, the US central bank: The US central bank. The Board publishes yields and the dollar index; the regional banks publish surveys and activity indexes.
Bank of England The United Kingdom's central bank: The UK central bank. Its statistical database supplies Bank Rate and gilt yields.
Bank of Japan Japan's central bank: Japan's central bank, whose policy rate is the uncollateralised overnight call rate.
RBI Reserve Bank of India: India's central bank, with an inflation target of 4 % and a tolerance band of 2 to 6 %.
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research: The private research body whose Business Cycle Dating Committee decides the official start and end dates of US recessions.
CEPR Centre for Economic Policy Research: The European research network whose Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee dates euro-area recessions.

Indicators

CLI Composite leading indicator: The OECD's index of series that turn six to nine months before GDP; 100 is trend growth.
ESI Economic Sentiment Indicator: The European Commission's composite of business and consumer surveys; 100 is its long-run average.
CFNAI Chicago Fed National Activity Index: A weighted average of 85 monthly US series; zero is trend growth, and a three-month average below −0.70 has marked every recession since 1967.
CISS Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress: The ECB's daily measure of stress across five segments, the money, bond, equity and currency markets and financial intermediaries, from 0 (none) to 1 (stress everywhere at once).
financial stress index: An index that combines market prices into one number for how strained financial conditions are; zero is average, positive is above-average stress.
HICP Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices: The consumer price index compiled the same way in every EU country, and the measure the ECB targets at 2 %.
CPI Consumer price index: The price of a fixed basket of goods and services bought by households; its yearly change is the inflation rate.
core CPI Inflation excluding the most volatile items: Inflation with food and energy removed, so that a bad harvest or an oil shock does not hide the underlying trend.
PMI Purchasing managers' index: A monthly survey of purchasing managers; above 50 more firms report growth than contraction.
DSR Debt service ratio: Interest plus repayments of the private non-financial sector as a share of its income, published quarterly by the BIS.
credit-to-GDP gap Credit to the private sector as a share of GDP, minus its long-run trend: How far private credit has run ahead of its trend relative to the economy; the Basel early-warning gauge for banking crises.
Sahm rule A real-time recession indicator built from the unemployment rate: When the three-month average unemployment rate rises 0.50 points above its low of the past year, a US recession has begun.
initial claims New claims for unemployment insurance: The number of people filing for unemployment benefit for the first time each week; the earliest published labour-market signal.
GDPNow The Atlanta Fed's running estimate of current-quarter GDP growth: A model estimate of the current quarter's US GDP growth, updated after every data release, months before the official number.
Decision Maker Panel The Bank of England's monthly survey of chief financial officers: A monthly Bank of England survey of about 2,500 firms' finance chiefs on their sales, prices, employment, wages and uncertainty.
Economy Watchers Survey Japan's monthly survey of people who observe the economy at street level: A Cabinet Office survey of taxi drivers, shop staff, restaurant managers and recruiters on whether conditions are improving; 50 is neutral.
M4 The United Kingdom's broad money supply: The UK's measure of broad money: sterling deposits and short-term instruments held by households and firms.
TSF Total social financing: China's broadest measure of credit to the real economy, including bank loans, bonds and shadow finance, published monthly by the central bank.
house prices Nominal residential property prices, year on year: Nominal house prices against a year earlier; two quarters of falls mark the point at which a slowdown reaches household balance sheets and bank collateral.
government debt Credit to the general government as a share of GDP: What the state owes as a share of a year's output; shown for context because no published line separates safe from unsafe, and the level explains how much room a government has to respond.
real policy rate The policy rate minus core inflation: The policy rate less core inflation over the past year: how hard monetary policy is braking. It triggers when it is a point above its ten-year mean and the central bank is still raising.
labour trigger The Sahm-rule construction applied to each region's unemployment rate: When the unemployment rate rises half a point above its low of the past year, the economy is in recession; a rule that has not missed a US recession since 1970.
activity survey A monthly survey of firms or consumers that turns before the hard data: Surveys of businesses and households published within days of the month's end; below their neutral line, more respondents see contraction than growth.
credit impulse The change in the flow of new credit, and lending growth more generally: Whether banks are lending more or less than a year ago; the change in new lending leads demand, and the zero line is a worldstat.us construction.
trade bellwether Goods exports as an early read on global demand: A region's goods exports, year on year in dollars; two months of falling exports is the sign used here that external demand has turned.
broad dollar index The Federal Reserve's trade-weighted index of the dollar against a broad group of currencies: The dollar against 26 trading partners' currencies, weighted by trade; a dollar rising more than 5 % in a year tightens conditions for everyone who borrows in dollars.

Concepts

yield curve The spread between long and short government bond yields: Long yields minus short yields. When short rates exceed long ones the curve is inverted, which has preceded most recessions.
coincident Leading, coincident and lagging indicators: A leading indicator turns before the economy does, a coincident one at the same time, a lagging one afterwards.
regime The four bands on the world score: One phrase for how broadly the indicators are clear of their thresholds: Broad growth (65 and above), Uneven growth (50 to 64), Broad slowing (35 to 49) or Contraction (below 35).
threshold The published line each indicator is measured against: The level at which an indicator counts as having signalled, taken from the literature or the publisher and printed on every indicator page.
false positive A signal that fired without the event following: A crossing that was not followed by a recession, shown in the track record rather than hidden.
tolerance band The range around an inflation target within which the central bank need not act: The margin either side of an inflation target, such as India's 2 to 6 % around a 4 % target.
seasonally adjusted Data with the regular yearly pattern removed: The series with predictable seasonal swings, such as Christmas hiring or summer holidays, statistically removed so months can be compared.
diffusion index The share of respondents reporting an increase minus the share reporting a decrease: A survey score where zero (or 50, depending on the convention) means as many respondents see things improving as worsening.
countercyclical capital buffer Extra bank capital required when credit is growing too fast: The Basel III rule that tells regulators to demand more bank capital as the credit-to-GDP gap rises, reaching the maximum at a gap of 10 points.
recession A broad, sustained decline in economic activity: A significant decline in activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months; dated after the fact by committees such as the NBER.
revision A change to a number after it was first published: Publishers update past figures as more complete data arrive; the first published number is a vintage.
policy rate The short-term interest rate a central bank sets: The overnight rate a central bank targets to steer inflation and demand; shown for context because it explains the yield curve and the credit cycle rather than predicting them.

Units and abbreviations

GDP Gross domestic product: The total value of everything an economy produces in a period; the measure the indicators here are trying to anticipate.
pp Percentage points: The difference between two percentages. A rate rising from 4 % to 4.5 % has risen 0.5 pp, not 12.5 %.
y/y Year on year: The change against the same period a year earlier, which removes seasonal effects without statistical adjustment.
3m on 3m Latest three months against the previous three: The average of the last three months compared with the average of the three before, which smooths a noisy monthly series.
q/q annualised Quarter on quarter, at an annual rate: The quarterly change compounded as if it continued for a year; the US convention for quoting GDP growth.
basis points Hundredths of a percentage point: One basis point is 0.01 percentage points; 25 basis points is the usual size of a central bank rate move.
JGB Japanese government bond: A bond issued by Japan's Ministry of Finance; the ten-year JGB yield is the benchmark long rate in Japan.
gilt A UK government bond: British government bonds, named for the gilt-edged certificates they were once printed on; the ten-year gilt yield is the UK benchmark.
Treasury US government debt securities: Bonds and bills issued by the US Treasury; the ten-year yield and the three-month bill rate define the US yield curve.
Bank Rate The Bank of England's policy interest rate: The rate the Bank of England pays on reserves, set by its Monetary Policy Committee eight times a year.
deposit facility rate The ECB's main policy rate: The rate banks earn on overnight deposits at the ECB, its effective policy rate since 2022.
fed funds The US policy interest rate: The overnight rate at which US banks lend reserves to each other; the FOMC sets a target range for it.
repo rate India's policy interest rate: The rate at which the Reserve Bank of India lends overnight to banks against government securities; its main policy rate.
call rate Japan's overnight interbank rate: The uncollateralised overnight rate in Japan's interbank market, which the Bank of Japan targets as its policy rate.
CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: A licence that allows any reuse of data or text provided the source is credited.
Open Government Licence The UK government's open data licence: The licence under which the ONS and the Bank of England publish their data: free reuse with attribution.