The long term discount rate is critically dependent upon projections of future growth rates that are fuzzier in proportion to the remoteness of the time horizon. This paper models such increasing fuzziness as an evolving hidden-state stochastic process. The underlying trend growth rate is an...

This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong,...

Increases in the proportion of the working age population can yield a quot;demographic dividendquot; that enhances the rate of economic growth. We estimate the parameters of an economic growth model with a cross section of countries over the period 1960 to 1980 and investigate whether the...

The paper looks at the development of the secular stagnation thesis, in the context of the economic history of the time. It explores some 19th century antecedents of the thesis, before turning to its interwar development. Not only Alvin Hansen, but Keynes and Hicks were involved in the...

Forecasts for the two or three years after mid-2014 have converged on growth rates of real GDP in the range of 3.0 to 3.5 percent, a major stepwise increase from realized growth of 2.1 percent between mid-2009 and mid-2014. However, these forecasts are based on the demand for goods and services....

The United States achieved a 2.0 percent average annual growth rate of real GDP per capita between 1891 and 2007. This paper predicts that growth in the 25 to 40 years after 2007 will be much slower, particularly for the great majority of the population. Future growth will be 1.3 percent per...

Although macroeconomic forecasting forms an integral part of the policymaking process, there has been a serious lack of rigorous and systematic research in the evaluation of out-of-sample model-based forecasts of China's real GDP growth and CPI inflation. This paper fills this research gap by...

Consensus forecasts for the global economy over the medium and long term predict the world's economic gravity will substantially shift towards Asia and especially towards the Asian Giants, China and India. While such forecasts may pan out, there are substantial reasons that China and India may...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

This paper examines the likely growth of U.S. GDP in the decade beginning in 2010. I analyze the two components of the rise in GDP over this ten year period: (1) the recovery from the substantially depressed level of economic activity at the start of the decade; and (2) the rise in potential GDP that...