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Growth Forecasts (growth + forecast)
Selected AbstractsHow tight is the UK labour market?ECONOMIC OUTLOOK, Issue 4 2004Article first published online: 14 OCT 200 With the unemployment rate touching 25-year lows and some signs of a pick-up in earnings growth, concern has again focussed on how much scope the labour market has to meet the requirements of the above-trend growth forecast for the UK. This article by David Tinsley reviews some of the evidence for how ,tight' the UK labour market is. It suggests that, although the labour market has probably tightened over the last year or so, the headline figures give a somewhat misleading picture. It goes on to argue that there are a number of other margins for adjustment by which the demands of the robust growth forecast for the UK over the next few years can be met without igniting significant inflationary pressure. [source] How quickly do forecasters incorporate news?JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMETRICS, Issue 6 2006Evidence from cross-country surveys Using forecasts from Consensus Economics Inc., we provide evidence on the efficiency of real GDP growth forecasts by testing whether forecast revisions are uncorrelated. As the forecast data used are multi-dimensional,18 countries, 24 monthly forecasts for the current and the following year and 16 target years,the panel estimation takes into account the complex structure of the variance,covariance matrix due to propagation of shocks across countries and economic linkages among them. Efficiency is rejected for all 18 countries: forecast revisions show a high degree of serial correlation. We then develop a framework for characterizing the nature of the inefficiency in forecasts. For a smaller set of countries, the G-7, we estimate a VAR model on forecast revisions. The degree of inefficiency, as manifested in the serial correlation of forecast revisions, tends to be smaller in forecasts of the USA than in forecasts for European countries. Our framework also shows that one of the sources of the inefficiency in a country's forecasts is resistance to utilizing foreign news. Thus the quality of forecasts for many of these countries can be significantly improved if forecasters pay more attention to news originating from outside their respective countries. This is particularly the case for Canadian and French forecasts, which would gain by paying greater attention than they do to news from the USA and Germany, respectively. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] An assessment of the EU growth forecasts under asymmetric preferencesJOURNAL OF FORECASTING, Issue 6 2008George A. Christodoulakis Abstract EU Commission forecasts are used as a benchmark within the framework of the Stability and Growth Pact, aimed at providing a prudential view of economic outlook, especially for member states in an Excessive Deficit Procedure. Following Elliott et al. (2005), we assess whether there exist asymmetries in the loss preference of the Commission's GDP growth forecasts from 1969 to 2004. Our empirical evidence is robust across information sets and reveals that the loss preferences tend to show some variation in terms of asymmetry across member states. Given certain conditions concerning the time horizon of forecasts and the functional form of the loss preferences, the evidence further reveals that the Commission forecasting exercise could be subject to caveats. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||