Over the past 20 years, the RAE has produced commodity forecasts in BAE Trends in Australian Agricultural Commodities, Farm Costs and Farm Incomes and other commodity outlook publications. There have been several studies on the accuracy of the forecasts, either comparing RAE forecasts with naive...

A multi-equation end-use model is used to analyse the consumption of sawn-timber in Australia. The forecasting ability of the model is evaluated. Simulations of the model are reported and implications for policy are discussed.

This paper begins with the observation that the constrained maximisation central to model estimation and hypothesis testing may be interpreted as a kind of profit maximisation. The output of estimation is a model that maximises some measure of model fit, subject to costs that may be interpreted...