The Performance of National Institute Economic Forecasts

Abstract

Economic forecasts are usually presented as point estimates, despite the margin of uncertainty which surrounds them. In November 1995 the National Institute began to present estimates of the probability of the government's inflation target being met and of there being a fall in GDP. This article describes the methods that we use for calculating these probabilities. We show, by studying eight successive forecasts of the same event, how forecast reliability improves as the forecast horizon approaches and demonstrate that this can be explained in terms of the accumulation of information about the state of the economy.