Economic crystal balling

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I’ve heard it said that we must discount government economic managers’ economic growth projections by up to 2 percentage points, because their positions oblige them to be publicly optimistic

“cheerleaders.” If one is to go by the official government GDP growth projection for 2021 of 6.5 to 7.5 percent, the more realistic outlook would then be 4.5 to 5.5 percent. But as I explain below, even that may be a significant overestimate.

But no mathematical model of any economy can claim to be a precise predictor of economic performance. Formulation of these models is informed by historical data on key variables found by careful statistical analysis to be closely related, based on sound economic theory, to the economic indicator in question . The input data could be on variables such as employment, prices, trade, investment levels, money supply, previous years’ GDP, and others.

Scientific as they may be, mathematical models of the economy can never capture all the factors affecting its performance. No economic model predicted the deep recession that COVID-19 caused in the past year, for example. Political, social, and environmental disturbances are either neglected or omitted in such models simply because these cannot be put into numbers.

 

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