A ranking of VAR and structural models in forecasting

This paper ranks economic forecasts performances for two structural models against a benchmark of time series models, VAR and ARIMA, according to a set of statistical measures calculated for the main economic aggregates. The period of analysis covers twenty years for annual data (1985-2004) and 28 quarters for quarterly models (1998:1-2004:4). Furthermore, models are tested to see whether predictions contain additional information more than the one showed by a random walk process (Fair-Shiller, 1987). Results show a net supremacy of VAR models over structural models and have significant contribution to information than the one contained in the random walk process.