Budgetary Forecasting in India: Partitioning Errors and Testing for Rational Expectations

Lekha Chakraborty and Darshy Sinha

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: According to the theory of efficient markets, economic agents use all available information to form rational expectations. Fiscal marksmanship, the accuracy of budgetary forecasting, can be one important piece of such information the rational agents must consider in forming expectations. Using Theil’s inequality coefficient (U) based on the mean square prediction error, the paper estimates the magnitude of errors in the budgetary forecasts in India for the period 1990-91 to 2003-04 and also decomposed the errors into biasedness, unequal variation and random components to analyze the source of error. The test of rational expectations revealed that neither revenue nor expenditure forecasts in India is rational. However, capital budget revealed more forecast errors than revenue budget. The results also revealed that degree of errors in forecasting of receipts was relatively higher than that of expenditure. However there is no specific trend in the forecasting errors, which reveals that budgetary estimates are made not based on adaptive expectations. The proportion of error due to random variation has been significantly higher (which is beyond the control of the forecaster), while the errors due to bias has been negligible. The analysis related to efficiency of forecasts also showed that no significant improvement in forecasts over time.

Keywords: fiscal marksmanship; Theils’ inequality coefficient; rational expectations; budgetary forecast errors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-for and nep-mac
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/7538/1/MPRA_paper_7538.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:7538

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 ().