Measuring Economic and Financial Activity and Constructing Leading Economic Indicators for Emerging Markets

Inflation, interest rates, financial and economic activity. We are familiar with these concepts, as they are highly analyzed for the developed markets we hear about regularly in the business news. These factors are key to macroeconomic models, and yet they have hardly been studied for an increasingly important slice of the world economy: emerging markets, like Turkey, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Cem Çakmaklı aimed to fill this gap and has developed tailored models that fits these markets precisely.
Emerging markets, have unique characteristics that mean they need to be analyzed differently. First of all, the lack of available data presents a challenge. The data that do exist may come in different forms or be collected on different schedules. These diverse sources must be integrated correctly to draw meaningful conclusions about emerging markets. Their behavior can also be erratic while young and still growing, or show effects that are ignored in traditional analyses, like large ups and downs, deep recessions, rapid recoveries and seasonal changes that are present in the published datasets. Dr. Çakmaklı’s new methods successfully take all of these elements into account, allowing for more accurate modeling and better predictions of the behavior and risks of tomorrow’s markets.