The purpose of this paper is to examine with econometric methods the impact of foreign trade on the German business cycle. The outcome is that the fluctuations of German GDP can be explained to a considerable amount by the fluctuations of world demand and changes in the terms of trade.

Multi-step-ahead forecasts of forecast uncertainty in practice are often based on the horizon-specific sample means of recent squared forecast errors, where the number of available past forecast errors decreases one-to-one with the forecast horizon. In this paper, the efficiency gains from the...