Quelques constats sur les prévisions conjoncturelles de la croissance française

Thomas Jobert () and Lionel Persyn

Revue d'économie politique, 2012, vol. 122, issue 6, 833-849

Abstract: We study the quality of the French growth forecasts from the first decade of the century. An optimism bias of the quarterly Consensus growth forecasts can be asserted right from a graphic analysis and its existence is confirmed by the calculation of the mean errors which are systematically negative. The Theil index reveals that Insee forecasts are superior to the Consensus ones. In addition, the Consensus forecasts are superior to a naïve forecast. Proper tests seem to confirm that an optimism bias exists ; this bias could arise from the combination of several forecasts. The study of the Consensus Economics fixed event forecasts regarding the next coming year requires a preliminary analysis due to missing data. We thus only retain the forecasts of nine institutions that we compare to those of the Government, the IMF, the OECD, and the European Commission. It appears that the forecasts are fairly close to the Consensus forecast and that the optimism bias is still observable. Finally, the disagreement between the forecasters increases towards a recession and, then, decreases.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REDP_226_0833 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2012-6-page-833.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
Working Paper: Quelques constats sur les prévisions conjoncturelles de la croissance française (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cai:repdal:redp_226_0833

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie politique from Dalloz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().