Spain

We’ve just added new high frequency indicators from the Spanish Tax Agency. The dataset consists of daily sales figures broken down per sector of activity: accommodation, restaurants, clothing, construction, manufacturing and more. 

In the chart below, we used the total sales variable as a leading indicator for the monthly retail trade statistics. The latest figures tend to indicate an increase of the year-on-year change for January. 

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Another way to work with this dataset is to compare the evolution of the activity for each year by slicing the data. 

In the chart below, we look at the tourism sector (measured as an aggregation of accommodation, restaurants and accommodation services). 2020 was of course strongly impacted by the pandemic: sales never exceeded their pre-pandemic levels even during the summer. In 2021, it moved in the opposite direction, with stronger activity than the past four years from the summer up until year end. 

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United States

For the United States, we’ve expanded our coverage for the Port of Los Angeles with the addition of vessel statistics for the port of Long Beach and the San Pedro Bay Complex, which comprises the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach.  

The chart below displays the number of vessels at anchor, meaning at sea waiting to be unloaded. Congestion peaked in October-November 2021, creating massive bottlenecks on the global supply chain, but has been easing since then. 

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New Zealand

We’ve significantly increased our real estate coverage for New Zealand with the addition of several datasets focusing on the housing market, sourced from the Ministry of Housing & Urban Development. 

Among the indicators now available, users can now access median prices, rent ratio, sales price appraisal ratio, volume of transactions, Fisher price index, and more, on a city and district level. 

In the chart below, we took the median price for 73 cities and districts available and displayed the evolution in percentage during the past ten years. On average, prices have increased by 132% in that period. 

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Nicaragua

We’ve also expanded our coverage of Nicaragua, with the addition of a monthly economic activity index, created by the central bank.

Such indices are considered as proxies for GDP growth, with a benefit of having a higher frequency, meaning they can be used as leading indicators. In the chart below, we can see the strong correlation between the economic activity index and real GDP – the latest data points indicating a slower growth for Q4 2021 compared to the two previous quarters. 

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