The OECD Weekly Tracker of GDP growth provides a real-time high-frequency indicator of economic activity using machine learning and Google Trends data. It has a wide country coverage of OECD and G20 countries. The Tracker is thus particularly well suited to assessing activity during the turbulent period of the current global pandemic. It applies a machine learning model to a panel of Google Trends data for 46 countries, and aggregates together information about search behaviour related to consumption, labour markets, housing, trade, industrial activity and economic uncertainty (see blog post).

The Weekly Tracker proxies the percent change in weekly GDP levels from the pre-crisis trend. The pre-crisis trend is taken from OECD forecasts made prior to the crisis (in the November 2019 Economic Outlook). Two other flavours of the Tracker are also available in the datafiles:

- a Tracker of weekly GDP growth year-on-year (that is, the percent change in weekly GDP from the same week in the past year), and
- a Tracker of weekly GDP growth year-on-two-year (the percent change in weekly GDP from the same week two years earlier).

Please note these are not official OECD forecasts, which are most recently published in the OECD Economic Outlook. However, the Tracker is one of several indicators that feeds into the OECD forecast process, which helps to situate the current state of the economy.

Weekly data