This is the first in a series of blog posts analysing and discussing monthly industrial production time series in the former Yugoslav republics, now six independent states.

Aims

The aims of these blog posts are the following:

• To describe main features of monthly industrial production time series
• To model series using popular time series models
• To forecast future industrial production indices
• To compare forecasting performance of different time series models

Dataset

The dataset under examination for all countries comes from the Eurostat database (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database). It shows monthly volume index of industrial production (including: mining and quarrying; manufacturing; electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply) (base 2015 = 100). Six time series are unadjusted data (i.e. neither seasonally adjusted nor calendar adjusted data) and another six time series are seasonally adjusted and calendar adjusted data.

The following list gives for each country: name, (acronym), and the period covered:

• Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH): 2008M1 to 2018M8
• Croatia (Cro): 1998M1 to 2018M8
• Macedonia (Mac): 2000M1 to 2018M8 
• Montenegro (Mon): 2011M1 to 2018M8
• Serbia (Ser): 2000M1 to 2018M8 
• Slovenia (Slo): 1998M1to 2018M8.

Dataset description

Dataset is available for download in two formats: csv and RData.

Column name in csv file uses the following format for the first six series: Zzz, where Zzz is the acronym for the country (BiH, Cro, Mac, Mon, Ser and Slo). The last six series column name ZzzS are seasonally and calendar adjusted time series for the country (BiHS, CroS, MacS, MonS, SerS and SloS). Period covered in the csv file: 1998M1 to 2018M8.

Those familiar with R could download and use RData file. This file contains time series in different formats, but the time series used directly in the next blog posts have names in the following format: Zzz, where Zzz is the acronym for the country (BiH, Cro, Mac, Mon, Ser and Slo). These are multivariate time series objects containing original and seasonally adjusted time series for each country. This RData file contains also a few other time series objects in different format (a, Ats, Azoo, Azoo.name, Bts, and Bts.name).

In the next blog post line graphs for each country monthly industrial production time series will be presented and discussed.