Thirty-year assessment of Asian Development Bank's forecasts

Abstract

This study assesses the performance of the forecasts of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for 45 countries between 1989 and 2019 with the following results: first, forecast accuracy and bias vary among countries and across variables; second, the Asian currency and global financial crises adversely affected the GDP and inflation forecast accuracy, whereas there were no such impacts on the current account forecast accuracy; third, the ADB's forecasts are broadly unbiased; fourth, inflation forecasts are efficient but the GDP and current account forecasts are not; finally, unbiasedness is broadly robust for the countries' regions. These results suggest that the ADB plays a grounding economic role in providing a reliable economic outlook for policymakers and businesses world wide.