This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

The paper describes revisions to the trend employment component of the production function underpinning long-term economic scenarios. Starting with historical age and sex-specific employment rates, a novel approach is developed to correct for cyclical effects using the country-level employment...

The OECD framework for estimating potential output is combined with previous OECD empirical research to analyse the causes of recent weak productivity growth. Current weak labour productivity growth in many OECD countries reflects historically weak contributions from both total factor...

Current weak labour productivity growth in many OECD countries reflects historically weak contributions from both total factor productivity (TFP) growth and capital deepening. The slowdown in trend productivity growth in the pre-crisis period is mostly explained by a long-established slowdown in...

This paper firstly describes the role of models in producing OECD global macroeconomic forecasts; secondly, reviews the OECD's forecasting track record; and finally, considers the relationship between forecast performance and models. OECD forecasts are not directly generated from a single global...

This paper builds an innovative composite world trade cycle index (WTI) by means of a dynamic factor model to monitor and perform short-term forecasts in real time of world trade growth of both goods and (usually neglected) services. The selection of trade indicator series is made using a...

This paper extends the OECD Economics Department’s suite of short-term indicator models for quarterly GDP growth, which currently cover only the G7 countries, to the BRIICS countries. Reflecting the relative scarcity of high-quality macroeconomic time series, the paper adopts a small-scale...

This paper introduces the OECD Weekly Tracker of economic activity for 46 OECD and G20 countries using Google Trends search data. The Tracker performs well in pseudo-real time simulations including around the COVID-19 crisis. The underlying model adds to the previous Google Trends literature in...

This paper compares the short-term forecasting performance of state-of-the-art large-scale dynamic factor models (DFMs) and the small-scale bridge models routinely used at the OECD. Pseudo-real time out-of-sample forecasts for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States...