Why we should not believe all the IMF's gloomy predictions
Evening Standard|February 02, 2023
The IMF's bleak projections of a recessionary year ahead for the British economy forecasting it would perform worse even than Russia's have been a major talking point this week.
Daniel O'Boyle
Why we should not believe all the IMF's gloomy predictions

But an analysis by the Evening Standard may bring some comfort to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt as it suggests the IMF's track record on predicting the UK's post-Covid recovery is a long way from infallible.

For those looking for reasons to believe that the British economy will do better than the IMF's projection of a 0.6% fall, the IMF's forecasting record in 2021- the last full year with official GDP data may offer hope.

The IMF made four GDP projections in 2021: in January, April, July and October. The last three of these reports were all more pessimistic than the average - and ended up missing the actual outcome by a wider margin.

The four IMF projections were out by an average of 1.7 percentage points in 2021. This was worse than the average of a sample of 34 independent forecasters collected by the Treasury which missed by an average of 1.55 percentage points.

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