The quality of the OECD's Economic Outlook growth projections was last evaluated in-house at the peak of the previous business cycle, calling for a reassessment. This paper analyses the OECD's annual GDP growth projections for the G7 countries over the period 1991-2006 and compares them with the...

China's economy underwent a steady recovery in 2021. Investment grew steadily with structural improvement. Exports and imports surged while trade surplus expanded. On the other hand, although labor market conditions improved, income distribution worsened, contributing to sluggish growth in...

The Chinese economy upheld a frail recovery in 2022 under the triple superposition of contraction of demand, disruption in supply, and weakening expectations, aggravated by unanticipated adverse shocks in the midst of global turmoil. Over the year, rising income uncertainty set off by the...

This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the...

We apply textual analysis tools to the narratives that accompany Federal Reserve Board economic forecasts to measure the degree of optimism versus pessimism expressed in those narratives. Text sentiment is strongly correlated with the accompanying economic point forecasts, positively for GDP...

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and instantaneous available source of leading indicators, the ifo World Economic Survey (WES), to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and instantaneous available source of leading indicators, the ifo World Economic Survey (WES), to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries...

Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...