The Toll Index (TI) is a new monthly indicator for the German business cycle and is offered by the IDSC of IZA as a service to forecasting practitioners and policy makers alike. The TI measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across the country and has highly desirable availability properties (insignificant revisions, short publication lags) as a result of the innovative technology underlying its data collection. It is coincident with production activity due to the prevalence of just-in-time delivery. The Toll Index is a good early indicator of production as measured for instance by the German Production Index, provided by the German Statistical Office, which is a well-known leading indicator of the Gross National Product. This new index is an excellent example of technological, innovation-driven economic telemetry, which we suggest should be established more around the world.
The Toll Index was introduced in a paper by N. Askitas and K.F. Zimmermann (IZA DP5522) which is forthcoming in the Journal of Forecasting. In the IDSC labs you can find more experimental indicators.
External Links:
http://www.bag.bund.de (Data Provisioning)
http://www.toll-collect.de (MAUT Operator)
http://www.destatis.de (German Production Index)
The Toll Index in the press:
Tim Harford's Blog
Financial Times
MoneyWeek
WirtschaftsWoche (New Economics, Maut als Maßstab, Nr. 041, p. 044, 10/10/2011)
Verkehrs Rundschau
Marketplace Europe on CNN International
Big Data - Wie Forscher mit unseren Daten die Zukunft vorhersagen - <<Input>> on DRS3 Swiss public radio, January 1 2012
Data Download:
The data file is in tab delimited plain text form and contains four variables called km, trip, in and out. The reference interval is one month and the series starts in January 2007. The variables are derived from monthly kilometers driven, toll trips made, number of inbound border crossing trucks and number of outbound border crossing trucks respectively.
The derivation is made by scaling the corresponding quantities from the reports of the German Federal Bureau of Transportation so that on January 2007 they are all equal to 103.3 which is the value of the German Industrial Production (with construction) which is compiled by DESTATIS. (www.destatis.de).
The graphs below show how the various flavors of the Toll Index (i=inbound vehicle activity, o=outbound vehicle activity, t=truck trips, k=truck kilometers) compare to the German Production Index all the way to the latest month. As the MAUT data for a given month are released on the 20-25th of the following month the TI tells us what happened in that month about 3 weeks in advance of the publication of the first preliminary value of the Production Index and can be hence thought as a short term forecast of the German Production Index and the German business cycle.
Press: We suggest that the index be referred to as "the Toll Index of the IDSC of IZA" or similar and abbreviate it to "the TI". For questions regarding the index please contact Head of IDSC, Dr. Nikos Askitas (askitas@iza.org). For a quick reading of the index please consult the front page widget idsc.iza.org.
WIDGET: IN expresses the number of inbound trucks, OUT the outbound ones, TRIPS is the number of "MAUT trips" and KM expresses the kilometers driven. AVG is simply the average of IN, OUT, TRIPS and KM. GPI stands for the German Production Index which is produced by Destatis. The row LEVEL shows the value of the indices, whereas the rows MONTH and YEAR contain the percentage of month on month and year on year changes of the indices.
