How good are economic forecasts?

I wrote last week that “macroeconomic forecasts are little better than shooting blindfold”. I don’t know if it was connected or not, but on the same day a journalist (Richard Pullin) from Reuters phoned me to ask about assessing some economic forecasts. He wanted to compare the accuracy of several economic forecasts for Japan and he wasn’t sure how to go about it. I helped him to calculate the MASE for the different forecasts and the results have now been …