This page is currently under revision and will be updated by December 2011 as soon as the new legislation is published in the Official Journal.

Literature

• European Economy. Economic Papers 247. March 2006. Commonly agreed methodology for the estimation of potential output and CABs

• Budgetary elasticities and sensitivities for the EU budgetary surveillance [46 KB]

• Eurostat. Guidance on EDP reporting

• Commission forecasts

CIRCA website on output gaps

A wide range of material relating to the estimation of output gaps, including data, programmes and methods, are available at the dedicated CIRCA website.

Structure of the Circa website

The site is divided into three distinct sections.

The first section provides an overview of the production function methodology. It includes the NAWRU Kalman Filter program which has been developed by Christophe Planas and Alessandro Rossi of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (Program GAP - Version 4.1, April 2009).

PROGRAM GAP is built for trend-cycle decompositions.It is currently used by DG ECFIN and Member States to decompose unemployment into its long and short-term components.

The second section of the website contains the detailed potential growth and output gap results from the latest Commission services forecasts as well as the underlying data sets and programs used in the calculations.

The third section, "Archives", contains the potential growth and output gap results from previous forecasting exercises.