Economic Forecasts in Haver Analytics

With recession on the horizon, questions have arisen as to how deep, how widespread and how long it will be. Forecasts of Gross Domestic Product for a number of countries, which may help in answering some of these questions, can be found in various Haver databases.

For the United States, Macroeconomic Advisors provides short-term quarterly and long-term annual forecasts of GDP that are updated quarterly. The most recent forecast covers the period from the third quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of 2010 and was updated on October 24. Oxford Economics provides quarterly and annual forecasts for ten years into the future for most countries. Their latest forecasts were issued October 16. The first chart shows the Oxford Economics annual forecasts for India and China and the second shows forecasts for Germany, Japan and the United States.

Eurostat publishes an annual series of GDP for all European Union countries as well as Croatia, Macedonia, Turkey, Norway and Switzerland. The last two years published are forecasts. For example, currently data are given for 2008 and 2009, both of which are forecasts. The latest data for these series were published on October 8. The OECD Outlook also publishes forecasts. These, however, are released only twice a year, in June and December. Sometimes the forecasts are outdated by subsequent events as at present.