Today’s post by Jan Hendrik Pretorius compares historical IMF forecast errors of SA’s GDP growth, comparing current year and each of the 5 year-ahead forecasts against the latest available (2025) estimates. Like the National Treasury and SARB (here and here), the IMF progressively lowered its GDP forecasts, but still tended to over-estimate future growth. Effects from the COVID-19 pandemic also led to large forecast errors in the long-term projections for data for 2020 onwards.
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Footnote
For each vintage, the estimate for a given year is compared with the 2025-vintage estimate for the same year.
Forecast error (percentage points) = vintage − 2025: positive = over-estimation; negative = under-estimation.
Horizon labels: T = that year; T+1 = next year; etc. Example (2017 vintage)
T = estimate for 2017 (2017 vintage) − estimate for 2017 (2025 vintage)
T+1 = estimate for 2018 (2017 vintage) − estimate for 2018 (2025 vintage)
T+2 = estimate for 2019 (2017 vintage) − estimate for 2019 (2025 vintage)
