This paper proposes an international collaboration between researchers in academia and policymaking institutions to stimulate and coordinate research on probability forecasting in macroeconomics, developing a toolbox for short-term prediction. The toolbox should include time series models,...

This report describes how major Latin American central banks conduct and use stress tests in assessing the soundness of their banking systems. Methodologies are compared with the help of a common stress-testing exercise run by the central banks participating in the study group. In general,...

Factors that have tended to result in declining inflation rates worldwide since 2013 include subdued global economic activity, declining energy and commodity prices, technological innovation and inflation expectations that are anchored at historically low levels around the world. The...

This country note discusses measures of inflation used in monetary policy formulation in Singapore, and assesses the relative influence of global and regional factors in determining domestic inflation dynamics. It is found that the regional factor has grow n in importance as a source of external...

Inflation in China is driven by volatile yet persistent changes in food and energy prices, making it difficult for policymakers and investors to gauge the underlying inflation trend. Traditional core inflation measures either neglect or down-weight the more volatile subcomponents of the CPI and...

Empirical evidence following conventional tests suggests that inflation expectations in Colombia might not be rational, although the period of disinflation included in the sample makes it difficult to verify this conclusion. Inflation expectations display close ties with observed past and...

Economic “slack” directly implies the ability for an economy to grow quickly without any necessary reversal in the future. This implication motivates a forecast-based approach to measuring economic slack. Given this approach, estimated output gaps for most of the major economies in Asia and...

Issues of inflation measurement are fundamental to the conduct of monetary policy. Price indices form the foundation of central bank policy frameworks around the world. They serve as guides to decision-making, as well as providing the primary mechanism for holding independent policymakers...

This paper explores the behaviour of inflation forecasts from a variety of sources (ie Consensus and other professional forecasters, international and domestic financial institutions, central banks) with the aim of measuring the size and evolution of forecast disagreements and their proximate...

This short paper is an abbreviated version of Nishizaki et al (2012). Japan has suffered from long-lasting but mild deflation since the latter half of the 1990s. Estimates of a standard Phillips curve indicate that a decline in inflation expectations, the negative output gap, and other factors...