This is done in relation to the benchmark of World Economic Outlook (WEO) projections by the International Monetary Fund. Amid much heterogeneity across countries and years, it has been found that ADO and WEO projections overlap quite closely. Both are inaccurate, especially during crisis years,...

Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, test, test. Sure - but test what? Test the maintained assumptions of the disturbances. Test the parameter restrictions of a given model. Test the explanatory power of a model against a rival model. In...

Historically, time series forecasts of economic variables have used only a handful of predictor variables, while forecasts based on a large number of predictors have been the province of judgmental forecasts and large structural econometric models. The past decade, however, has seen considerable...

The Asian Development Outlook (ADO) provides growth and inflation forecasts for more than 40 economies in the region. This paper assesses the accuracy of those forecasts against actual outcomes for the years from 2008 to 2011. The World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecasts by the International...

We consider a number of ways of testing whether macroeconomic forecasters herd or anti-herd, i.e., whether they shade their forecasts towards those of others or purposefully exaggerate their differences. When applied to survey respondents' expectations of inflation and output growth the tests...

The German economy continues to perform well although the boom has ended. However, at 1.5 percent, German GDP will increase this year at a lower rate than expected at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, concerns about an imminent recession should give way to the assessment that the pace of...