Nowcasting Real GDP growth in South Africa

Alain Kabundi (), Elmarie Nel and Franz Ruch

No 7068, Working Papers from South African Reserve Bank

Abstract: This paper uses nowcasting to forecast real GDP growth in South Africa from 2010Q1 to 2014Q3 in real time. Such an approach exploits the flow of high-frequency information underlying the state of the economy. It overcomes one of the major challenges faced by forecasters, policymakers, and economic agents - having a clear view of the state of the economy in real time. This is often not the case as many economic variables are only available at low frequency and with considerable lags, making it difficult to have information on the state of the economy even after the end of the quarter. The pseudo out-of-sample forecasts show that the nowcasting models performance is comparable to those of professional forecasters even though the latter enhance their forecasting accuracy with judgement. The nowcast model also outperforms all other benchmark models by a significant margin.

Date: 2016-02-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-for and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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