Economic forecasting is a science plus an art. You will be surprised to find out that there are many central banks who get their economic forecasts wrong most of the time. This includes the FED and the Bank of Japan. The best forecaster is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But IMF is not a central bank strictly speaking. According to Bloomberg, Bank of Canada is the most accurate forecaster but it has an easy job.
Economists are aware of the pitfalls of prediction — there’s an old joke that they do it to make astrologers look good. Some aren’t interested in rating the accuracy of projections, since there’s never any real expectation that they’ll be accurate, not least because they may well be undermined by events that nobody could have been expected to foresee. “With forecasting, they’re all wrong, but some are useful,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research in New York. “The forecast itself is fairly useless information, I’m not going to base my call on it. What’s more important is how they respond to a given set of data rather than how they expect that data to evolve.”
The art of economic forecasting is improving with the passage of time. But you cannot predict a black swan event whatever methodology you employ.
