Forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic variables and aims, first, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of...

This study analyzes the performance of the IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts for world output and the aggregates of both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current and the next year, we examine whether IMF forecasts can be...

We provide a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call dynamic pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, with and without financial frictions, for output...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

This paper studies professional forecasts on a micro level using three alternative data sets. The analysis is mainly based on the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasts for the euro area, but for comparison, Consensus Economics survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasts for the US are also...

Using OECD composite leading indicators (CLI), we assess empirically whether the ability of the country-specific CLIs to predict economic activity has diminished in recent years, e.g. due to rapid advances in globalisation. Overall, we find evidence that the CLI encompasses useful information...

Forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic variables and aims, first, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of...

The United States has turned into an anarchic Hobbesian in part triggered by; weakening dollar's natural pull as the main reserve currency; China's massive foreign reserves; fast rise of the renminbi; the failure attempts to dismantle gold and its readiness to reclaim a monetary role at the...

We construct a measure of global liquidity using the growth rates of broad money for the G7 economies. Global liquidity produces forecasts of US inflation that are significantly more accurate than the forecasts based on US money growth, Phillips curve, autoregressive and moving average models....

To examine whether including economic data on other countries could improve the forecast of U.S. GDP growth, we construct a large data set of 77 countries representing over 90 percent of global GDP. Our benchmark model is a dynamic factor model using U.S. data only, which we extend to include...