ETLA European Unemployment Rates Analysed

ETLAnow is an experiment at ETLA, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, to usebig data in economic forecasting.

At the moment, ETLAnow predicts the unemployment rate in every EU country using real-time data from Google Trends database and latest official data from Eurostat. The forecasts for three months ahead are automatically updated every morning. The forecasts are also available on Twitter. ETLAnow is a collaborative work of 29 European research institutions.

They have crafted several documents on the ETLAnow project. This report provides an overlook on how the model works. A more extensive analysis on unemployment forecasting using Google data is provided in a working paper using U.S. data. Earlier work also includes this brief, which is based on our first trial for real-time forecasting and an earlier report in Finnish.

The ETLAnow project is lead by Joonas Tuhkuri at ETLA.

This is what unemployment looks like in the EU at the moment. 

Last update for the automated estimates: 28.5.2016. Next forecast available: 29.5.2016.