As fourth quarter GDP releases start to trickle in later this week we feature one take on achieving a growth target. Plus, the winners and losers in three decades of globalization.

How to Boost Your Country’s GDP Figures Like China (The Sounding Line, 3 min read) Ahead of Friday’s Q4 China GDP release this article gives a simplified take on the country’s heavily criticised national accounts data. From building bridges to nowhere, rounding up and underestimating the past, this is the 101 guide to what is in reality a highly complex task.

Three Decades of Globalization: Which Countries Won, Which Lost? (Wiley, 30 page read) They find education and macroeconomic stability as robust determinants of a country’s share in world exports. In contrast to earlier decades, countries across income groups experience marginalization and globalization.

Economic Policy Uncertainty in the Euro Area: an Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach (ECB, 45 page) The paper presents a novel machine learning approach to estimate economic policy uncertainty and its sub-components using news articles from Germany, France, Spain and Italy over almost twenty years. The paper concludes the fiscal policy uncertainty component was quite significant for Spain and Italy when the sustainability of public finances was in focus. Investment for France, Italy and Spain reacts heavily to political uncertainty.