Abstract:

It is possible to carry out international forecasting simply by summating forecasts carried out on a national level, just in the same way as one often forecasts at the level of one country by adding together the forecasts made for each region of the country. Looked at in this way, forecasting on an international level does not present, any problems over and above those which we all have in our own countries and to resolve them we can use standard methods. However, we believe that the problem is really one of achieving a global forecast on an international level, and.not simply a mosaic of individual forecasts. It is proper in these circumstances to consider a group of nations as a single entity for which we are proposing to try to make forecasts. Before examining the possibility of using normal forecasting, methods, it would .seem of interest to examine the influence of the characteristics of the group of nations for which we are going to carry out forecasts.