A Comparison of Some Inflation, Growth and Unemployment Forecasts

The purpose of this article is to provide some further empirical evidence on the ex ante forecasting performance of the three major independent modelling groups in the United Kingdom, namely, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NI), the Centre for Economic Forecasting of the London Business School (LBS) and the Liverpool Modelling Group (LI). The motivation for our analysis is threefold. First is the fact that according to many forecasting practitioners, the ultimate test of an econometric model is its predictive ability.