A Post-Mortem on Economic Outlook Projections

This paper reviews the accuracy of the OECD Economic Outlook projections — both “current year” and “year ahead” — for output growth, inflation and current account balances (as a percentage of GDP) for the major seven countries, as well as projections for world trade growth. The sample period differs somewhat between the variables, depending on data availability, but it runs until 1998 in all cases. Several evaluation criteria were used to assess the accuracy of the OECD Economic Outlook projections. These include an inspection of projection error summary statistics; comparisons with “naive” alternative forecasts; statistical tests for unbiasedness and efficiency; and testing for directional accuracy. In addition, the paper provides an examination of the performance of OECD Economic Outlook projections over different time periods. The findings suggest that, on the basis of the conventional statistical criteria, the current year projections outperform the year ahead projections ...