Forecasting Exports and Imports: Introduction

The National Institute is currently studying ways of improving its methods of short-term economic forecasting. The two articles which follow report on some of the recent work undertaken in two parts of the field, namely exports and imports.In the case of exports, our methods hitherto have been rather subjective. The first article is the account of a more rigorous procedure proposed for one part, though a very important one, of total exports of goods, namely exports of manufactures to industrial countries. Attempts to find procedures of analogous rigour for exports to primary producing countries have, so far, failed to throw up anything very useful. For imports, our procedure has for some time been rigorous, in the sense of making use of postulated econometric relationships. Thus the second article does not so much propose a new method as elaborate and modify existing methods in a way which may prove to be more satisfactory.