Leveraging Non-traditional Data for Macroeconomic Nowcasting: The Case of Morocco

Making informed policy decisions is contingent upon the availability of reliable and timely data. The use of non-traditional data has been shown to be a powerful tool in allowing policymakers to achieve robust nowcasting—the practice of estimating the current period’s economic indicator(s), ahead of official releases, using a wide range of macroeconomic and high-frequency data. This paper showcases how different types of non-traditional data, such as indices extracted from satellite imagery, Google Trends, and flight tracking information, can be leveraged to complement official statistics and monitor economic activity, and how these timely signals can be incorporated into nowcasting models to provide early estimates of key macroeconomic variables in Morocco. The approach is applied to agricultural gross value added, tourism revenues, and the unemployment rate. The results demonstrate that non-traditional data substantially improves nowcasting models by enhancing predictive accuracy and enabling the rapid generation of nowcast estimates prior to the release of official data.