The ECB survey of professional forecasters (SPF) - A review after eight years' experience

Geoff Kenny, Veronique Genre, Carlos Bowles, Roberta Friz, Aidan Meyler and Tuomas Rautanen

No 59, Occasional Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: Eight years have passed since the European Central Bank (ECB) launched its Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). The SPF asks a panel of approximately 75 forecasters located in the European Union (EU) for their short- to longer-term expectations for macroeconomic variables such as euro area inflation, growth and unemployment. This paper provides an initial assessment of the information content of this survey. First, we consider shorter-term (i.e., one- and two-year ahead rolling horizon) forecasts. The analysis suggests that, over the sample period, in common with other private and institutional forecasters, the SPF systematically under-forecast inflation but that there is less evidence of such systematic errors for GDP and unemployment forecasts. However, these findings, which generally hold regardless of whether one considers the aggregate SPF panel or individual responses, should be interpreted with caution given the relatively short sample period available for the analysis. Second, we consider SPF respondents JEL Classification: C83, E37, E50

Keywords: evaluation; expectations; macroeconomic forecasts; uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-04
Note: 339061
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (97)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpops/ecbocp59.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ecb:ecbops:200759

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Occasional Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().