Description: The Committee on Economic Statistics of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries has recommended that the Institute sponsor an Economic Forecasting Board composed of actuaries and economists. Its role would be to develop formal projections of interest rates, inflation rates, productivity and wages. This article discusses the role of such a board, the purposes for the projections, and the potential roadblocks to accomplishing this.

Description: The author discusses the review of a recent 2001 Wall Street Journal’s semiannual survey of economists’ forecasts, starting by asking if there is a simple way to summarize the results and to extract a consensus forecast, and from this extraction, determine when an individual forecast is significantly different from that of the consensus.This article is reprinted with permission. It last ran in the Jan. 10, 2001 issue of The La Jolla Economics newsletter.