This paper demonstrates that factor-based forecasts for key Australian macroeconomic series can outperform standard time-series benchmarks. In practice, however, the advantages of using large panels of data to construct the factors typically comes at the cost of using less timely series, thereby...

The paper is motivated by two empirical results. Australia’s terms of trade exhibit temporary fluctuations around a slowly declining trend, and movements in Australia’s real exchange rate tend to follow those in the terms of trade. Together these results imply predictability in Australia’s...