FocusEconomics today announced the winners of the 2019 Analyst Forecast Awards, recognizing the most accurate forecasters for the main macroeconomic indicators across 92 countries and 23 commodity prices in 2018. FocusEconomics surveys over 1000 economic experts from national and international banks, top financial institutions and economic research companies every month to obtain their projections for the main macroeconomic indicators and commodity prices.
Forecasters are ranked according to the average of their discounted forecast errors of forecasts submitted to FocusEconomics' survey over a two year period. Errors are defined as the absolute difference between an individual forecast and the actual result of the economic indicator/commodity price, and they are discounted such that an error at the beginning of a forecast cycle has less weight than at the end of the cycle.
The list of winning institutions includes Capital Economics, Citigroup Global Markets, Euromonitor International, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Fitch Solutions, HSBC, JPMorgan and Oxford Economics. The EIU and Oxford Economics topped the list with 39 and 38 first place rankings respectively.