Although many studies on the directional accuracy of forecasts by international organizations and professional forecasters have been scrutinized, little attention has been paid to forecasts by business leaders. In order to address this gap, we use directional tests to investigate whether...

This study develops and uses for forecast a small-scale macro-econometric model of the Nigerian economy. The effects of three policy scenarios built around the assumptions of the changes that the Central Bank of Nigeria is likely to make to the Monetary Policy Rate are proposed and analyzed....

What is the welfare loss arising from uncertainty about true policy targets? We quantify these effects in a DSGE model where private agents are unable to distinguish between temporary shocks to potential output and to the inflation target. Agents use optimal filtering techniques to construct...

This paper examines the effectiveness of monetary policy in Kenya based on policy simulations from a structural macroeconometric model. The analysis is conducted using the policy rate, i.e. the central bank rate (CBR) and the cash reserve ratio (CRR) with respect to the interest rate and bank...

In this paper we present a methodology for measuring income inequality dynamically within a Markov model of income evolution. The proposed methodology requires knowledge of the evolution of the population and the averages and medians of the incomes in a country and allows the computation of...

Libya experienced traumatic political and economic upheaval during 2011 arising from an eight-month-long civil war that cost thousands of lives, resulted in major economic dysfunction, destroyed part of the country's infrastructure, almost halted oil production, the country's major source of...

This work proposes a new forecasting model to analyse the economic development of Sichuan province of China. The model, which introduces the concept of diversity, is based on an improvement of the -GMDH algorithm. The new method, called D-GMDH, is compared with two ensemble approaches which are...

We develop and estimate a medium-sized, semi-structural model for the Brazilian economy during the inflation targeting period. The model describes fairly well key features of the economy and allows us to decompose the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. In the baseline decomposition, the...

Opting for structural or reduced form estimation is often hard to justify if one wants to both learn about the structure of the economy and obtain accurate predictions. In this paper, we show that using both structural and reduced form estimates simultaneously can lead to more accurate policy...

Between 1990 and 2010, the Dutch government pursued two successful fiscal adjustments: first, in 1995–2002, through a pure expenditure-based strategy and second, in 2004–2007, through a mixed strategy based on social transfer cuts and tax increases. In order to assess welfare and, in...