There aren’t many measures of euro area wide economic activity at higher than monthly frequency, to my knowledge. One series is the Woloszko (OECD) Weekly Tracker, based upon big data and machine learning, discussed   here. VoxEU post here. This measure shows deceleration in the week through 9/17.

Figure 1: Woloszko (OECD) Weekly Tracker for Euro Area (black), Germany (blue), France (green), Italy (red), all in %. OECD.

The OECD Weekly Tracker reading of 1.6 is interpretable as a y/y growth rate of 1.6% for year ending 9/17. How well does the OECD Weekly Tracker to for the Euro Area? Here is the Tracker time averaged to conform to quarterly data.

Figure 2: Year-on-year Euro area real GDP growth  (teal), and implied growth from Weekly Tracker (black), both in %. Weekly Tracker for Q3 is thru 9/17. CEPR defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded light green. Source: Eurostat via FRED, OECD, CEPR, and author’s calculations.

The Weekly Tracker follows q/q annualized growth pretty well for the Euro area (it’s not so good for the US).

What’s apparent is that GDP growth is decelerating — down to 2%. Interestingly, the Cascaldi-Garcia, Ferreira, Giannone & Modugno Euro area nowcast of 9/23 is for 0.1% q/q growth, which is in turn consistent with 2.03% y/y growth.

(The Deutsche Bundesbank as a series for Germany, here.)

Addendum:

Interestingly, Deutsche Bank (DB), which has just updated its forecasts, sees a small q/q decline in Euro area GDP in Q3, and deep declines in subsequent quarters, of -1, -1.2, and -0.5 percentage points.

Source: Sidorov, et al. “Forecast Update: Deeper inflationary recession,” Focus Europe, Deutsche Bank, 21 September 2022.

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