90th East Jour Fixe of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank

Can we win the battle against uncertainty? New approaches to macroeconomic forecasting in CESEE

In the last 15 years, professional forecasters have been confronted with several crises, each of them distinct in terms of underlying causes, international propagation, policy responses and economic impact. Each crisis has also brought about advances in modeling and data. Structural equilibrium models are used as well as judgment-free, highly complex, sometimes non-linear, and time-variant models. Text analysis performed by artificial intelligence is competing with expert-informed forecasts based on national accounting. New and unconventional data sources are increasingly being explored, allowing for data to be collected at a higher frequency and with ever greater granularity. In addition to traditional economic data, forecasters are also including night-light data, truck mileage, scanner data or mobility trends in their analyses, to name but a few unconventional data sources. Will these advances be sufficient to address today’s increased volatility and elevated uncertainty? Can they provide timely and unerring forecasts in the current crisis? After all, it is especially at the onset of a crisis that policymakers need timely and accurate forecasts to design effective policy responses.

The 90^th East Jour Fixe will bring together professional forecasters from international institutions, central banks and academia to share lessons learned from past crises, explore latest trends in forecasting and discuss challenges associated with data availability. In doing so, the focus will be put on Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) economies. While forecasting in the region no longer has to rely on short time series, the use of novel and unconventional data sources still varies greatly from one CESEE country to another.

Date:
October 04, 2022
1:00 p.m to 4:30 p.m. (CEST)

Venue:
Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Otto-Wagner-Platz 3
1090 Vienna
and online via Webex