Official Economic Forecasting: the Relevance of the Canadian Experience for Transitional Economies

Patrick Grady

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Ministries of Economy (MoEs) in the transitional economies of the Former Soviet Union have been given the responsibility for economic forecasting. They have usually been created out of Ministries of Planning (MoPs). The required transformation from planning to forecasting, which requires a fundamental change in mindset and approaches, is discussed in the first part of this paper. In making this transformation from a MoP to a true MoE, there is much that official forecasters in transition economies can learn about economic forecasting from the experience of industrialized countries such as Canada. A brief overview of official economic forecasting as it is currently practised in Canada is provided in this paper. This includes econometric modelbased forecasting at the Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada and the recent prudent approach to fiscal forecasting initiated by the current Finance Minister to reduce the risk of unpleasant deficit surprises and thereby gain more credibility for fiscal policy. The adoption of the prudent approach underlines the perceived weakness of economic forecasting even in advanced industrialized economies. A summary of the advantages of forecasting with macroeconomic models based on the Canadian experience is presented in the paper.

Keywords: economic forecasting in transition economics; role Ministries of Economy; economic forecasting in Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-12-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/25285/1/MPRA_paper_25285.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:25285

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().