The “Gemeinschaftsdiagnose” [Joint Diagnosis (JD)] is the most influential semi-annual mac-roeconomic forecast in Germany. Jointly produced by up to six institutes, its accuracy as well as the large number of involved participants is often criticised. This study examines the JD’s growth...

Ullrich Heilemann und Stefan Wappler, Universität Leipzig, untersuchen die strukturelle - vor allem die sektorale - Dimension des Anpassungs- und Aufholprozesses der ostdeutschen Wirtschaft.

Over the past 50 or so years, I have been concerned with the quality of economic forecasts and have written both about the procedures for evaluating these predictions and the results that were obtained from these evaluations. In this paper I provide some perspectives on the issues involved in...

This paper asks whether the accuracy of German macroeconomic forecasts has improved over time. We examine one-year-ahead forecasts of rates of real GDP growth and inflation for the years 1967 to 2010 by three major German forecasters and the OECD. We find that overall error levels are high but...

Since the seminal work of Adleman/Adleman, econometric models are presumed to be driven by changes of the exogenous variables, modified by the model's dynamics. Our knowledge of the impulse/propagation mechanism in macroeconometric models is, however, still rather poor. In following a more...

This paper examines changes of the (West) German business cycle from 1958 to 2004. It starts with a multivariate linear discriminant analysis (LDA) based decomposition of the cycle into 4 phases (upswing, upper turning point, downswing, lower turning point). After examining intercyclical changes...