This paper illustrates the changes made to the coincident indicator of euro-area economic activity, €-coin, to increase its ability to track the medium- to long-term growth component of quarterly GDP even after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. These innovations became operational starting with the release of the indicator for December 2020.
The changes concerned mainly the estimation sample and the composition of the dataset. They improved €-coin's ability to capture both the sudden worsening of the economic situation in the first half of 2020 and the slowdown observed in the autumn of the same year, due to the resurgence of the pandemic, without altering its ability to estimate, with stability and precision, the medium- to long-run growth component of GDP, including in the past.
