Economic forecasts are an important element of rational economic policy both on the federal and on the local or regional level. Solid budgetary plans for government expenditures and revenues rely on efficient macroeconomic projections. However, official data on quarterly regional GDP in Germany are not available, and hence, regional GDP forecasts do not play an important role in public budget planning. We provide a new quarterly time series for East German GDP and develop a forecasting approach for East German GDP that takes data availability in real time and regional economic indicators into account. Overall, we find that mixed-data sampling model forecasts for East German GDP in combination with model averaging outperform regional forecast models that only rely on aggregate national information.

中文翻译：

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临近预报东德GDP增长：MIDAS方法

经济预测是联邦，地方或地区一级合理经济政策的重要组成部分。政府支出和收入的可靠预算计划依赖有效的宏观经济预测。但是，尚无德国季度区域GDP的官方数据，因此，区域GDP预测在公共预算计划中不发挥重要作用。我们为东德GDP提供了一个新的季度时间序列，并针对东德GDP制定了一种预测方法，该方法考虑了实时数据可用性和区域经济指标。总体而言，我们发现东德GDP的混合数据抽样模型预测与仅依靠总体国家信息的区域平均预测模型相比，其表现要好。