The system of leading indicators of the development of national industry: a conceptual approach

Industrialization, which is currently taking place in the world under new technological conditions, guarantees successful economic development. In this regard, analysts, entrepreneurs, government officials, politicians at the local and national levels are interested in timely and reliable information about the state and prospects for the development of the national industry. To get signals about changes in economic activity in the near future, economists use leading indicators – dynamic data series that demonstrate a fairly stable connection with the basic data series of the macroeconomic development cycle in a particular country. However, in connection with the peculiarities of development, each state has to find its own solutions in this subject area. The article focuses on leading indicators of industry development. The objectives of the work are to generalize the accumulated experience in the field of short-term forecasting of industry based on the use of the dynamics of indicators that have a leading connection with industrial production, and to substantiate recommendations regarding the possibilities of their use for short-term forecasting of the industrial development of Ukraine. As a result of the generalization of the world experience of using leading indicators, considering the national industrial specifics, two working hypotheses were suggested in the research process. The first one is based on the fact that (a) when forecasting the turning points of economic activity in the national industry, it is necessary to focus on general and specific leading indicators of countries that are the main partners of Ukraine, especially those to which goods of the industrial group are exported; (b) the list of candidate indicators should include world energy prices, taking into account the significant dependence of national production on hydrocarbon imports; (c) in addition to the real money supply, the dynamics of industrial value added are influenced by other monetary factors, namely – the hryvnia exchange rate to the dollar and the index of the US dollar, which is explained by the openness of the national economy, its small size, specialization in the export of raw materials and significant dependence on the import of industrial goods, necessary to create products with high value added. For further verification of this hypothesis, it is offered to divide the relevant indicators into four groups: those based on the results of enterprise surveys, indicators of financial activity of enterprises, monetary and socio-economic indicators. At the same time, the availability of data and promptness of updating (at least quarterly) is a key condition for their inclusion in the selection of candidates. The second working hypothesis is that the proposed indicators can serve as ones to provide early signals about the dynamics of the value added created in the industry. In order to verify it in practice, it is necessary to create a database of indicators that can be used to predict the dynamics of gross value added in industry, perform mathematical calculations (build quantitative dependencies of value added on selected indicators considering the time lag), integrate individual indicators into a composite index of industrial development. The subject of further research is solving these problems.