Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA … informational value as they consistently outperform naive forecast approaches. However, we also document that there is room for … improvement: two thirds of the key macroeconomic variables that we examine are forecast inefficiently and 6 variables (growth of …

An essential element of the work of the Fund is to monitor and forecast international trade. This paper uses SWIFT … (PMI), to improve the short-term forecast of international trade. A horse race between linear regressions and machine …-learning algorithms for the world and 40 large economies shows that forecasts based on linear regressions often outperform those based on …

This paper investigates the performance of the IMF WEO growth forecast revisions across different horizons and country … negative; (ii) on average, growth revisions are in the right direction, becoming progressively more responsive to the forecast … revisions in all country groups; (iv) WEO and Consensus Forecast growth revisions are highly correlated; (v) fall-to-spring WEO …

have strong explanatory power to forecast world trade and national trade in selected economies. The informational content … from documentary collections helps improve the forecast of world trade, while a horse race with machine learning algorithms …This paper extends earlier research by adding SWIFT data on documentary collections to the short-term forecast of …

This paper examines the performance of World Economic Outlook (WEO) growth forecasts for 2004-17. Short-term real GDP … countries less accurate than a naive forecast given by the average growth rate in the recent past. The analysis suggests that a …