This paper does two things. First it examines the use of real time inter-annual cash data and the role of early interventions for improving the monitoring of national fiscal policies and the correction of fiscal indiscipline. Early warnings are important because they allow us to spread the...

We analyse the relative performance of the IMF, OECD and EC in forecasting the government deficit, as a ratio to GDP, for the G7 countries. Interesting differences across countries emerge, sometimes supporting the hypothesis of an asymmetric loss function (i.e. of a preference for...