Where Is Global Growth Heading?… Econbrowser

Guest writers at Econbrowser, Laurent Ferrara (Banque de France, Head of the International Macro Division) and Clément Marsilli (Banque de France, Economist in the International Macro Division), suggest that the IMF may, once again, be overestimating world economic growth… Here are the IMF’s past performances:

F and M: “Against this background, one may wonder where the global economy is heading. Are we going to continue to follow this pattern of systematically downgrading economic growth? We recently developed a tool to monitor in real-time the global GDP growth on a high-frequency basis using a large database and recent econometric models (see a summary on Econbrowser). The latest results have been published in a Banque de France economic letter and show that with data used until April 4, the world GDP growth rate is estimated to be at 2.9%. This nowcast for 2016 is below IMF estimates, but close to OECD value estimated at 3.0%. Thus, the IMF estimation of world GDP could be revised downwards in the coming months, taking it to its lowest level since 2009.”

Here is their nowcast compared with IMF’s estimate:

Here is the link:  http://econbrowser.com/archives/2016/05/guest-contribution-where-is-heading-global-economic-growth