Economic activity grew 2% in October compared to the same month last year. The estimate is contained in the Economic Activity Indicator (IAE), released today (25) by the Economic Policy Secretariat of the Ministry of Economy.
The expansion was driven by information services, whose activity grew 8.4% compared to October last year. Then came transport, with expansion of 7.2%, and the category of other services, with an increase of 6.5%. On the other hand, the manufacturing industry contracted by 4.9%, and commerce shrank 3.3% in the same comparison.
Expected to be released every month, the IAE compares some economic data released daily to draw an estimate of how much activity grew or contracted in five sectors of the economy compared to the same month last year. Among the data used in the indicator are the values of invoices from the Federal and State Revenues, the variation in electricity consumption and mobility statistics in urban traffic, roads and airports.
According to the Ministry of Economy, the indicator intends to bring forward, by one to two months, the release of indicators related to the performance of the economy. Until now, the most reliable indicator for drawing forecasts for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP, sum of goods and services produced) was based on monthly surveys by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and only provided data with a lag of three months .
According to the SPE, the indicator intends to provide a thermometer for GDP, but without making predictions for the behavior of the economy. The idea is just to show whether economic activity is growing or shrinking on which to base decision-making by the Ministry of Economy.
The IAE will be the second official indicator to provide data on economic activity. Since 2003, the Central Bank has released the Economic Activity Index (IBC-Br) every month, which gathers data on production, imports, taxes and subsidies on products to estimate the monthly performance of agriculture, industry and services. To eliminate typical fluctuations in economic activity at certain times of the year, the IBC-Br has seasonally adjusted data.
