On estimating contemporaneous quarterly regional GDP

Subnational regional jurisdictions rarely have at their disposal a reasonable array of timely statistics to monitor their economic condition. In light of this, we develop a procedure that simultaneously estimates a quarterly time series for all regions of a country based upon quarterly national and annual regional data. While other such techniques exist, we suggest a temporal error structure that eliminates possible spurious jumps. Using our approach, regional analysts should now be able to distribute national growth among regions as soon as quarterly national figures are released. In a Spanish application, we detail some practicalities of the process and show that our proposal produces better estimates than the uniregional methods often used.