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.
Live data and insights on Coronavirus around the world, including detailed statistics for the US, EU, and China — confirmed and recovered cases, deaths, alternative data on economic activities, customer behavior, supply chains, and more.
Which is the world's largest economy, China or the United States? As is usual in the field of economics, “It depends.” It depends on the methods used to estimate the size of an economy and to compare one economy to another. Despite modern discussions on refining the calculation of gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of an economy’s size and performance, to be more inclusive of economic factors that have been ignored to date, such as environmental and natural resource depletion, there is no commonly accepted alternative to GDP. There are, however, at least two commonly...
For the first time during the post World War II era, the global economy is expected to shrink due to measures in force worldwide to suppress the coronavirus, according to the IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) released on April 14, 2020. In this edition of the WEO, the IMF shortened the forecast horizon to 2021 instead of the expected 2025 horizon and limited the number of indicators available in its statistical tables because of the high level of uncertainty in current global economic conditions. In the baseline scenario—which assumes that the pandemic fades in the second half of...
It sounds like a riddle: how many Big Macs for your entire daily wage? Granted, many of our readers may not even have access to a Big Mac where they live (not to mention those who wouldn’t buy Big Macs if they were vegetarian, among other reasons). So, why is the Big Mac Index from the Economist a well-known concept around the world? It’s simple: Big Macs are easier for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population to understand as opposed to economic concepts like “GDP per capita in purchasing power parities,” which is a mouthful and a complicated concept. The answer to the...
The $9.7 trillion global shadow economy is the second largest economy in the world after the United States, according to the 2010 estimates of the black market for 162 countries. Still, as for the more recent study, the size of the underground economy in European and other OECD countries have been decreasing steadily since 2009 and continued shrinking in 2015 averaging to 16.7 percent of official GDP. But this development was not uniform across individual countries: 10 out of 36 OECD countries experienced an increase in the black market size in 2015. The most significant upsurge of...
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