Previsões macroeconómicas
: ciência ou futurologia?

  • Rafaela Patrícia Morais dos Santos (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

Macroeconomic Forecasts have a fundamental role in supporting fiscal/budgetary policy decision-making. These are the subject of extensive analyses in the literature. The present work has as its objective the assessment of the quality of macroeconomic forecasts made for Portugal between 2006 and 2016. Are considered the one-year ahead forecasts, made by Ministry of Finance, IMF, EC and OECD and the variables taken into account are: GDP, private consumption, public expenditure, investment (GFCF), exports and imports. Forecast quality is firstly evaluated taking into account some descriptive statistics like, forecast error, mean error, absolute mean error and standard deviation. And it is also evaluated, by the ability to anticipate the existing turning points. These indicators allow us to analyse and compare the performance of the referred institutions, as well as to find and compare some patterns and thus, verify which of them has a better forecast quality. It is concluded that: the forecast for the GPD are the ones with less error, the Ministry of Finance appear to be the best institution making forecast for Portugal and to readjust them to reality, OECD seem to be the one with less quality in its forecasts, and EC the slowest to readjust. It was also found that the Ministry of Finance is not more optimistic than others institutions.
Date of Award8 Jul 2020
Original languagePortuguese
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorAlexandra Leitão (Supervisor) & Francisca Guedes de Oliveira (Co-Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Quality
  • Macroeconomic forecast
  • Budgetary policy
  • Forecast error

Designation

  • Mestrado em Economia Empresarial

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