Bias in Official Fiscal Forecasts: Can Private Forecasts Help?Jeffrey A. Frankel, Jesse Schreger
NBER Working Paper No. 22349 Government forecasts of GDP growth and budget balances are generally more over-optimistic than private sector forecasts. When official forecasts are especially optimistic relative to private forecasts ex ante, they are more likely also to be over-optimistic relative to realizations ex post. For example, euro area governments during the period 1999-2007 assiduously and inaccurately avoided forecasting deficit levels that would exceed the 3% Stability and Growth Pact threshold; meanwhile private sector forecasters were not subject to this crude bias. As a result, using private sector forecasts as an input into the government budgeting-making process would probably reduce official forecast errors for budget deficits.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22349 Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
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