Abstract

Purpose - A variety of indicators are used for the diagnosis of economic situation. However, most indicators explain the past economic situation because of the time difference between the measurement and announcement. This study aims to argue for the resurrection of an idea: electricity demand can be used as an indicator of economic activity. In addition, this study made an endeavor to develop a new Real Business Index(RBI) which could quickly represent the real economic condition based on the sales statistics of industrial and public electricity. Research design, data, and methodology - In this study monthly sales of industrial and public electricity from 2000 to 2015 was investigated to analyze the relationship between the economic condition and the amount of electricity consumption and to develop a new Real Business Index. To formulate the Index, this study followed next three steps. First, we decided the explanatory variables, period, and collected data. Second, after calculating the monthly changes for each variable, standardization and estimating the weighted value were conducted. Third, the computation of RBI finalized the development of empirical model. The principal component analysis was used to evaluate the weighted contribution ratio among 3 sectors and 17 data. Hodrick-Prescott filter analysis was used to verify the robustness of out model. Results - The empirical results are as follows. First, compatibility of the predictability between the new RBI and the existing monthly cycle of coincident composite index was extremely high. Second, two indexes had a high correlation of 0.7156. In addition, Hodrick-Prescott filter analysis demonstrated that two indexed also had accompany relationship. Third, when the changes of two indexes were compared, they were found that the times when the highest and the lowest point happened were similar, which suggested that it is possible to use the new RBI index as a complementing indicator in a sense that the RBI can explain the economic condition almost in real time. Conclusion - A new economic index which can explain the economic condition needs to be developed well and rapidly in a sense that it is useful to determine accurately the current economic condition to establish economic policy and corporate strategy. The salse of electricity has a close relationship with economic conditions because electricity is utilized as a main resource of industrial production. Furthermore, the result of the sales of electricity can be gathered almost in real time. This study applied the econometrics model to the statistics of the sales of industrial and public electricity. In conclusion, the new RBI index was highly related with the existing monthly economic indexes. In addition, the comparison between the RBI index and other indexes demonstrated that the direction of the economic change and the times when the highest and lowest points had happened were almost the same. Therefore, this RBI index can become the supplementary indicator of the official indicators published by Korean Bank or the statistics Korea.