An essential element of the work of the Fund is to monitor and forecast international trade. This paper uses SWIFT … (PMI), to improve the short-term forecast of international trade. A horse race between linear regressions and machine …-learning algorithms for the world and 40 large economies shows that forecasts based on linear regressions often outperform those based on …

-recession years are revised slowly; in recession years, the pace of revision picks up but not sufficiently to avoid large forecast …

Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA … 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 …

documents of the following years to understand the evolution of fiscal forecast errors. Our findings suggest that: (i) for most … terms of drivers, we show that forecast errors for the fiscal balance-to-GDP ratio are positively correlated with GDP growth … and terms of trade changes and negatively with GDP deflator surprises; (iv) forecast errors for public debt-to-GDP ratios …

Recent technological developments and past technology transitions suggest that the world could be on the verge of a …