How do you track GDP in realtime?

If you want to highlight one dataset that is both super important AND lots of people think is flawed, then GDP is probably the right starting point. Critics say it’s a pretty poor way to measure a country’s well-being, for instance.

However it still matters, especially as the world’s economies try to recover from the Covid-battering they have gone through.

In fact, The OECD has been using Google Trends data combined with machine learning to monitor GDP on a weekly basis – as opposed to the quarterly releases we are used to. You can see more about this on The Economist today.