How accurate are professional forecasts in Asia? Evidence from ten countries

Qiwei Chen, Mauro Costantini and Bruno Deschamps

International Journal of Forecasting, 2016, vol. 32, issue 1, 154-167

Abstract: This paper assesses the performances of professional GDP growth and inflation forecasts for ten Asian economies for the period 1995–2012. We evaluate the accuracy of the forecasts, and test for unbiasedness and efficiency. Our results show that (i) forecast errors are large for most of the countries, but there are big differences between countries; (ii) forecasts improve slowly as the forecast horizon shortens, which helps to explain the magnitudes of the forecast errors; (iii) GDP growth forecasts underreact to economic news but inflation forecasts are mostly efficient; (iv) the sizes of forecast biases vary widely between countries, with a tendency for inflation to be overestimated; and (v) forecasts have value in predicting the direction of change.

Keywords: Professional forecasts; Forecast efficiency; Forecast bias; Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207015000886
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:intfor:v:32:y:2016:i:1:p:154-167

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2015.05.004

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Forecasting is currently edited by R. J. Hyndman

More articles in International Journal of Forecasting from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().