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The focus of this paper is on nowcasting and forecasting quarterly private consumption. The selection of real-time, monthly indicators focuses on standard ("hard" / "soft" indicators) and less-standard variables. Among the latter group we analyze: i) proxy indicators of economic and policy uncertainty; ii) payment cards' transactions, as measured at "Point-ofsale" (POS) and ATM withdrawals; iii) indicators based on consumption-related search queries retrieved by means of the Google Trends application. We estimate a suite of mixed-frequency, time series models at the monthly frequency, on a real-time database with Spanish data, and conduct out-ofsample forecasting exercises to assess the relevant merits of the different groups of indicators. Some results stand out: i) "hard" and payments cards indicators are the best performers when taken individually, and more so when combined; ii) nonetheless, "soft" indicators are helpful to detect qualitative signals in the nowcasting horizon; iii) Google-based and uncertainty indicators add value when combined with traditional indicators, most notably at estimation horizons beyond the nowcasting one, what would be consistent with capturing information about future consumption decisions; iv) the combinations of models that include the best performing indicators tend to beat broader-based combinations.1 This article summarises the main ideas and results reported in Gil, M.;

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In this paper we develop a comprehensive short-term fiscal forecasting system, useful for real-time monitoring of government's borrowing requirement in Spain, a country that has been at the center of the recent European sovereign debt crisis, not least because of sizeable failures to meet public deficit targets. The system is made of a suite of models, with different levels of disaggregation (bottom-up vs top-down; general government vs sub-sectors) suitable for the automatic processing of the large amount of monthly/quarterly fiscal data published nowadays by Spanish statistical authorities. Our tools are instrumental for ex-ante detection of risks to official projections, and thus can help in reducing the ex-post reputational costs of budgetary deviations. On the basis of our results, we discuss how official monitoring bodies could expand, on the one hand, their toolkit to evaluate regular adherence to targets (moving beyond a legalistic approach) and, on the other, their communication policies as regards sources of risks of (ex-ante) compliance with budgetary targets. JEL Classification: E62; E65; H6; C3; C82.