Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias,...

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) exercise at the IMF evolved during the 1980s, partly in response to demands by policymakers in national finance ministries for objective and internationally comparable projections and policy scenarios. The exercise had begun as a staff initiative, encouraged by...

A simple criterion based on the properties of the forecast error is presented to evaluate the accuracy of forecasts. The efficiency conditions of an optimization problem are used to show that under rational expectations the standard statistical conditions are necessary, but not sufficient to...

We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater...

Belarusian authorities contemplate transiting to inflation targeting. The paper suggests a small structural model at the core of the forecasting and policy analysis system. A well-researched canonical structure of Berg, A., Karam, P. and D. Laxton (2006) is extended to capture specifics of...

I regress real GDP growth rates on the IMF's growth forecasts and find that IMF forecasts behave similarly to those generated by overfitted models, placing too much weight on observable predictors and underestimating the forces of mean reversion. I identify several such variables that explain...

We describe the evolution of forecasts in the run-up to recessions. The GDP forecasts cover 63 countries for the years 1992 to 2014. The main finding is that, while forecasters are generally aware that recession years will be different from other years, they miss the magnitude of the recession...

We revisit the conventional view that output fluctuates around a stable trend by analyzing professional long-term forecasts for 38 advanced and emerging market economies. If transitory deviations around a trend dominate output fluctuations, then forecasters should not change their long-term...

Macroeconomic policy decisions in real-time are based the assessment of current and future economic conditions. These assessments are made difficult by the presence of incomplete and noisy data. The problem is more acute for emerging market economies, where most economic data are released...

This is the first of a series of papers that are being written as part of a project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In this paper, we estimate a small...