Toward a more reliable picture of the economic activity: An application to Argentina

•Our dynamic factor model allows for missing observations to compute GDP forecasts.•We obtain alternative output measures using indirect economic indicators.•We find a significant gap between estimated and official figures of Argentine GDP.

We advocate a dynamic factor model to provide alternative measures of output data using indirect information from economic indicators. We apply the method to show evidence of a significant gap between estimated and official measures of Argentine GDP since 2007.