An Assessment and Comparison of Two Niesr Econometric Model Forecasts

This article presents a methodology for decomposing ex ante forecasting error into exogenous variable error, data revision error, model error and judgement error. This methodology is applied to the forecasts made by the National Institute in February 1975 and February 1976. The first section describes the methodology including the NIESR forecasting procedure. Then the NIESR model (with some of its problems) is discussed together with the data used in the study. The methodology for decomposing the forecasting error to 1975 is applied and a similar analysis presented for 1976. Some conclusions and a summary complete the article.