Who Forecasts Best?

Abstract

In the Economic Bulletin for Europe, July 1953, the Economic Commission for Europe (E.C.E.) examined the reliability of the forecasting experiments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries relating to their national incomes and other macro-economic magnitudes.² The nature of the analysis is mainly descriptive. In particular no attention is paid to the question of which magnitudes have been forecast with reasonable success and which with considerable errors, nor to the question of what countries have been the most successful.

This translation of the article (from Dutch) first appeared in International Economic Papers 5 (1955) 194–199. Reprinted with the permission of MacMillan Publishing, United Kingdom.

Translated from Dutch by L.F. Manneke

“Wie Voorspelt het Best?,” De Economist, February 1954. The author, who graduated at the University of Amsterdam in 1950, is now Professor of Econometrics at the Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam. He has also been on the staff of the Government Planning Bureau at the Hague, and in 1952 was a visiting teacher at the International Statistical Education Centres in Calcutta and Beirut. In 1954, his Linear Aggregation of Economic Relations appeared in the series Contributions to Economic Analysis, published by the North Holland Publishing Company.