I calculate a monthly GDP proxy, called the QCI. It is an unweighted average of industrial production, non-agricultural employment, and the volume of retail sales.
The name comes from Quick Coinciding Index, and I called it that because when I first started calculating my coinciding indices, I used an IBM 286, which had a very small memory, and couldn't cope with the large arrays I was using in my calculations. The QCI was just a simple unweighted index, which the limited memory of my 286 could cope with without the need to roll arrays from memory out to the hard disk, and so was much quicker to calculate!
In most countries, a QCI correlates well with GDP, and its latest data are available a couple of months before GDP data are released.
The chart below shows the YoY % changes in real GDP and in my QCI. The gap over the last year is caused by post-covid "revenge spending" on services. That has recently started to fizzle out, so headline GDP growth will likely slow, even as the QCI picks up.
Note the weather-related slump in Jan 2024.
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