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

Qiwei Chen, Mauro Costantini, Bruno Deschamps

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

28 Citations (Scopus)
47 Downloads (Pure)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)154-167
Number of pages14
JournalInternational Journal of Forecasting
Volume32
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2016

Keywords

  • Asia
  • Forecast bias
  • Forecast efficiency
  • Professional forecasts

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business and International Management

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'How accurate are professional forecasts in Asia? Evidence from ten countries'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this