European Commission's Forecasts Accuracy Revisited

European Commission's Forecasts Accuracy Revisited
Author: Marco Fioramanti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN: 9789279544262

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This paper updates a previous assessment of the European Commission's track record for forecasting key economic variables (González Cabanillas and Terzi 2012) by extending the observation period to 2014. It also examines the accuracy of the Commission's forecasts over a shorter and more recent period (2000-2014) so that a comparison can be made between the performance of forecasts made before and after the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Going beyond the 2012 approach, this paper also examines the extent to which forecast errors can be explained by external or technical assumptions that prove incorrect ex post. It also updates the comparison of the Commission's performance vis à vis the OECD, the IMF, a consensus forecast of market economists, and the ECB. Inclusion of the 2012-2014 period lowers the forecasting error for some key variables or leads to no change in others.^Focussing on the years since the turn of the century, current-year and year-ahead forecasting errors for the three main variables examined (GDP growth, inflation and general government balances) have been larger in the crisis and post-crisis period (2008-2014) than in the precrisis period (2000-2007) for a large majority of Member States. This appears mainly to be the result of an anomalously large error in 2009, a year which confounded many forecasters. The country-by-country analysis confirms the finding of earlier studies which show that the Commission's forecasts are largely unbiased. The newly-introduced panel data approach also confirms the absence of bias in current-year GDP forecasts across EU Member States but shows that year-ahead forecasts for GDP growth tend to be slightly over optimistic across the whole sample. The analysis also shows that autocorrelation of forecast errors is not a major issue in the Commission's forecasts.^Other advanced tests shed more light on the performance of the Commission's forecasts, demonstrating that they are directionally accurate and generally beat a naïve forecast but that they are not always efficient in terms of their use of all available data. The decomposition of forecast errors shows that unexpected changes in external assumptions seem to have only a limited impact on current-year GDP growth forecasts. However, more than half of the variance in year-ahead forecast errors appears to come from external assumptions that prove to be incorrect ex post. Finally, the Commission's economic forecasts come out as being more accurate than those of the market and comparable to those of the other international institutions considered.

Forecasts in Times of Crises

Forecasts in Times of Crises
Author: Theo S. Eicher
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484345436

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Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF’s Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias, efficiency, and information content to find that IMF forecasts add substantial informational value as they consistently outperform naive forecast approaches. However, we also document that there is room for improvement: two thirds of the key macroeconomic variables that we examine are forecast inefficiently and 6 variables (growth of nominal GDP, public investment, private investment, the current account, net transfers, and government expenditures) exhibit significant forecast bias. Forecasts for low-income countries are the main drivers of forecast bias and inefficiency, reflecting perhaps larger shocks and lower data quality. When we decompose the forecast errors into their sources, we find that forecast errors for private consumption growth are the key contributor to GDP growth forecast errors. Similarly, forecast errors for non-interest expenditure growth and tax revenue growth are crucial determinants of the forecast errors in the growth of fiscal budgets. Forecast errors for balance of payments growth are significantly influenced by forecast errors in goods import growth. The results highlight which macroeconomic aggregates require further attention in future forecast models for countries in crises.

Does Money Growth Granger-Cause Inflation in the Euro Area? Evidence from Out-of-Sample Forecasts Using Bayesian VARs

Does Money Growth Granger-Cause Inflation in the Euro Area? Evidence from Out-of-Sample Forecasts Using Bayesian VARs
Author: Helge Berger
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2008-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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We use a mean-adjusted Bayesian VAR model as an out-of-sample forecasting tool to test whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the euro area. Based on data from 1970 to 2006 and forecasting horizons of up to 12 quarters, there is surprisingly strong evidence that including money improves forecasting accuracy. The results are very robust with regard to alternative treatments of priors and sample periods. That said, there is also reason not to overemphasize the role of money. The predictive power of money growth for inflation is substantially lower in more recent sample periods compared to the 1970s and 1980s. This cautions against using money-based inflation models anchored in very long samples for policy advice.

Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations
Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135179778

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Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Regional Economic Outlook: Europe, April 2023

Regional Economic Outlook: Europe, April 2023
Author: International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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Economic growth has tumbled across Europe, inflation remains too high, and financial sector risks have materialized. Taming sticky inflation while avoiding financial stress and a recession will require tighter macroeconomic policies—tailored to changing financial conditions, stronger financial regulation and supervision, and bolder supply-side reforms that heal scars from the COVID-19 and energy crises.

Simulating Inflation Forecasting in Real-time

Simulating Inflation Forecasting in Real-time
Author: Bianca Clausen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2010
Genre: Economic forecasting
ISBN:

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This paper simulates out-of-sample inflation forecasting for Germany, the UK, and the US. In contrast to other studies, we use output gaps estimated with unrevised real-time GDP data. This exercise assumes an information set similar to that available to a policymaker at a given point in time since GDP data is subject to sometimes substantial revisions. In addition to using real-time datasets for the UK and the US, we employ a dataset for real-time German GDP data not used before. We find that Phillips curves based on ex post output gaps generally improve the accuracy of inflation forecasts compared to an AR(1) forecast but that real-time output gaps often do not help forecasting inflation.This raises the question how operationally useful certain output gap estimates are for forecasting inflation.