EconData makes it easy to evaluate historic IMF, SARB and National Treasury forecast errors and data revisions. Today’s post by Lisa Martin shows that National Treasury has tended to under-estimate future government expenditure from 2018, with forecast errors increasing meaningfully post-pandemic. In the case of revenue, after generally over-estimating future revenue between 2015 and 2020, future revenues were generally under-estimated in the 2020 to 2022 Budget Reviews. Revenue over-estimation was larger pre-pandemic than expenditure under-estimation, but the role of expenditure surprises has been more important in budget deficits post-pandemic. We will investigate the extent to which these forecasts errors reflected a more uncertain macroeconomic environment, technical assumptions, implementation challenges, policy shifts and political decisions in a series of upcoming posts.
EconData’s Public Finance module makes it easy to assess historical forecast revisions from Budget Review data without having to manually copy data from individual budget documents. You can also automate any workflows that use such data, whether you work in excel, R or Python. Get in touch if you are interested in subscribing to EconData
