The accession of ten countries into the European Union makes the forecasting of their key macroeconomic indicators an exercise of some importance. Because of the transition period, only short spans of reliable time series are available, suggesting the adoption of simple time series models as...

In a globalised world economy, global factors have become increasingly important to explain trade flows at the expense of country-specific determinants. This paper shows empirically the superiority of direct forecasting methods, in which world trade is directly forecasted at the aggregate...

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...

Many empirical studies have shown that factor models produce relatively accurate forecasts compared to alternative short-term forecasting models. These empirical findings have been established for different macroeconomic data sets and different forecast horizons. However, various specifications...

Factor models are widely used in summarizing large datasets with few underlying latent factors and in building time series forecasting models for economic variables. In these models, the reduction of the predictors and the modeling and forecasting of the response y are carried out in two...

Viewed over the whole available history of fiat money in Sweden, high levels of inflation have been present only over a short time span. It is only in the last two decades - the seventies and the eighties - that inflation has been high, at an average of eight percent on an annual basis. Based on...

Monitoring and forecasting price developments in the euro area is essential in the light of the second pillar of the ECBu0092s monetary policy strategy. This study analyses whether the forecasting accuracy of forecasting aggregate euro area inflation can be improved by aggregating forecasts of...

We present a study on combining the forecasts from a time-series model and an econometric model in the context of the inflation rates of Turkey and propose a new weighting scheme, the time-varying simple weighting method. Our guiding principle for the deduction of this method is based on...