User:Vipul/Consensus Economics

Consensus Economics is a global macroeconomic survey firm that polls more than 700 economists monthly on their forecasts of macroeconomic indicators, interest rates, and inflation in 85 countries.

History
Consensus Economics was started in October 1989.

Forecasts
Consensus Economics publishes Consensus ForecastsTM, a widely cited monthly compilation of macroeconomic forecasts and topical analyses by country for 85 countries. The countries covered include member countries of the G-7 industralized nations, Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. It also has more specialized publications such as the Foreign Exchange forecasts and Energy and Metal price forecasts. Each forecast is distributed in hard-copy format and via email as PDF files and Excel spreadsheets.

In addition to the forecasts available for free online, Consensus Economics offers more detailed forecast data to institutional investors for a fee.

Partners
Consensus Economics data is offered by a number of partner companies that offer institutional investor data. These include CEIC Data, a Euromoney institutional investor company, that offers Consensus Economics and OECD data in addition to its own. Another example is Thomson Financial.

Academic research
The accuracy and bias in the Consensus Forecasts has been a topic of academic research. A 2009 paper by Ager, Kappler and Osterloh found: "The test for common bias reveals that several countries show biased forecasts, especially with forecasts covering more than 12 months. These results partially confirm the presumption that the macroeconomic forecasts for the past 10 years were severely affected by the pronounced shocks in that period. The fact that for individual countries systematic biases can be observed by applying the Consensus Forecasts reveals that in these countries the forecasting industry on the whole was not able to cope with the shocks specific to the past ten years. Revisions of past months for GDP growth forecast have significant explanatory power for current revisions for almost all countries. For inflation revisions we find significant past revisions for some countries. Overall, our results imply that a lack of information efficiency is more severe for GDP forecasts than for inflation forecasts."

A 2001 paper by Roy Batchelor of City University Business School, London compared the Consensus Forecasts with forecasts made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The study found: "With few exceptions, the private sector forecasts are less biased and more accurate in terms of mean absolute error and root mean square error. Formal tests show these differences are statistically significant for forecasts of real growth and production, less so for forecasts of inflation and unemployment. Overall, there appears little information in the OECD and IMF forecasts that could be used to reduce significantly the error in the private sector forecasts."

A 2007 paper by Batchelor used Consensus Forecasts data to consider various theories of bias in macroeconomic forecasts, and concluded: "In all countries there is evidence that individual forecasters converge on the consensus forecast too slowly. However, the persistent optimism of some forecasters, and the persistent pessimism of others, is not consistent with the predictions of models of “rational bias” that have become popular in the finance and economics literature."

Consensus Forecasts data has been cited by other academic literature, such as discussion of the Asian financial crisis.