For example, you might compare data on cash transactions or electricity consumption with official output figures.
These firms in turn favour capital-intensive investment projects, which add more to the output figures than to the payrolls.
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"This doesn't have anything to do with Abenomics, " said Yasunari Ueno, chief market economist at Mizuho Securities, referring to the output figures.
Now, we are seeing these pessimistic expectations reflected in national output figures.
The output figures were broadly in line with the forecasts of economists.
Again, however, official output figures, based on indicators such as the number of doctors and hospital beds, fail to take account of higher quality, so growth is understated.
China's economic growth rate may be gathering pace again, as the government released strong industrial output and retail sales figures.
BBC: China sees both industrial output and retail sales rise
The dollar firmed on November 29th as new figures showed output was up by 2.2% at an annual rate between July and September, compared with the original estimate of 1.6%.
Trade ministry figures showed output was down 1.2% in July, a steep reversal from the 0.4% rise recorded in June and way out of line with analysts expectations of a 1.7% increase.
One is that the GDP figures are simply wrong: employers are hiring this much because output is actually rising faster than the official figures suggest.
Today's figures show construction output down by 5.2% in the second quarter, and nearly 10% smaller than a year ago.
Today's figures suggest that output on the services side of the economy is now 1.8% lower than at the start of 2008.
In the production industries, which helped drive the fourth quarter figures downward, output is now 2.6% lower than it was at the end of 2010.
Recent GDP figures showed industrial output near recession levels.
Figures Thursday showed that output in Germany, Europe's largest economy, contracted by more than anticipated in the last three months of 2012.
The announcement came as Commerce Department figures showed US economic output shrank between July and September at a faster pace than initially predicted, which the White House described as "troubling".
By the second quarter of this year, the last point for which figures are available, Scottish output was 4.4% below its 2008 peak, while UK output was 3.82% down - ie the UK was closer to recovery.
The Bank of England had guessed the extra holiday would cut around 0.5% from second-quarter output, and boost the third-quarter figures by roughly the same amount (with a bump from the Olympic games).
"The figures show a strong increase in services output, " said Trevor Williams of Lloyds TSB.
Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Energy released new figures for 2010, showing that global output of carbon dioxide had increased by the biggest amount on record.
The rate of decline in industrial output in Spain increased in February, according to official figures.
The output rebound was in line with a spike in January sales figures released earlier in the month.
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But the Institute, which is based at Strathclyde University, is also predicting a slight deterioration in unemployment figures in the next two years due to weaker output and employment growth.
The Office for National Statistics, which produces the figures, did not have access to the industrial output, which includes energy production and mining, when it made its initial second-quarter GDP estimate.
Output of the UK economy is measured by Gross Domestic Product figures but to date there are no comparable figures to illustrate the performance of the Northern Ireland economy due to the lack of data.
Previously, the commission had to wait until all member states had calculated their own output data before it was able to work out EU-wide figures.
"With our own Scottish Chambers of Commerce Quarterly Business Survey projecting only a marginal improvement in output and confidence in the early part of 2013, these latest figures underline the picture of an economy that has been treading water for an extended period of time, " she said.
Figures released earlier this month by the ONS showed that manufacturing output in January had fallen by 1.5% from the month before.
However, the latest ONS figures also showed that in the three months to January, output from the services sector was down 0.2% compared with the previous quarter, which benefited from the boost the London Olympics gave to the economy.
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