The History of the Economic Forecasts

Each year several influential global agencies publish their views on the economic situation in the world. We have collected end-of-year baseline forecasts of the 5 largest agencies (IMF, World Bank, OECD, UN and the European Commission) for each available country since 1998 into the one dataset.

In this page, you can observe forecasts for 2014-2017, which were made by each of those agencies in previous years, and analyze the accuracy of the forecasts from the historical perspective.

It is hard to believe, but the data clearly shows that even the near-term forecasts were not considerably better than the simplest possible forecasting technique of using actual value for the current year to forecast the next year changes. Actually, in most cases this deadly simple and straightforward "rule of thumb" performed better than the forecasts of the global authorities (see the chart at the bottom of the page). However, it would be wrong to conclude that they are completely useless. It looks like when the agency's forecast differs from the previous year actual value significantly - it really means something. For example, in the end of 2009, all five organizations have correctly predicted the large economic rebound, which could not be forecasted only on the 2009-th numbers basis.

Dive deeper in the economic forecasts with our Forecast Tracking Tool.