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Nowcasting Madagascar's GDP growth: a machine learning approach

Author

Listed:
  • Gerzhino H. Rasolofomanana

    (MEF - Ministère de l'économie et des finances, Madagascar)

  • Franck Ramaharo

    (Université d'Antananarivo, MEF - Ministère de l'économie et des finances, Madagascar)

Abstract

We investigate the predictive power of different Machine Learning models to nowcast Malagasy GDP growth. We trained Lasso, Ridge, Elastic Net, Principal component regression, Random forest, K-Nearest Neighbour and Support Vector Machines algorithms on sixteen Malagasy quarterly macroeconomic and sectorial leading indicators over the period 2007:Q1-2021:Q4, and we used early estimation from the National Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) as a benchmark. We measured the nowcast accuracy of each model by calculating the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The results show that the machine learning algorithms outperform the traditional time series analysis that are the typical approaches in Malagasy GDP growth modeling. We conclude that Machine Learning models can deliver more accurate and timely nowcasts of Malagasy economic performance, and provide policy makers additional guidance for data-driven decision making.

Suggested Citation

  • Gerzhino H. Rasolofomanana & Franck Ramaharo, 2023. "Nowcasting Madagascar's GDP growth: a machine learning approach," Working Papers hal-04164610, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04164610
    as

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