In recent decades, business cycle phenomena of the kind seen in market economies have become prominent in India. Business cycles are now of considerable importance when thinking about Indian macroeconomics. The analysis of business cycles requires new work on measurement. This website aims to offer a series of papers in this field. We also have results and datasets based on the analytical techniques of these papers, which are updated every Monday.
- Seasonal adjustment
- Business cycle measurement requires a wide range of
seasonally adjusted time-series. In most countries, the
infrastructure of seasonally adjusted data is produced by the
statistical system, but in India this has not come about.
Seasonally adjusted series are particularly important in tracking current developments in the economy. The familiar year-on-year change is the moving average of the latest twelve monthly changes. In order to know what is happening in the economy, it is better to look at recent months, rather than looking back 12 months. The familiar y-o-y changes are a sluggish indicator of what is happening. Month-on-month changes are more informative: but this requires seasonal adjustment.
On this website, we have a dataset (in .csv format) with seasonally adjusted levels for some time-series. The web page makes it easy to get a sense of what is happening with month-on-month changes of seasonally adjusted data in these series. We offer graphs which can be readily embedded into your work products.
We welcome bug reports, suggestions and other feedback on this work.
