View the tool here.

Every six months, the International Monetary Fund publishes a new edition of their leading economic predictions in the World Economic Outlook (WEO). This widely anticipated publication provides detailed five-year forecasts for a wide array of economic variables for every country.

Economists rely on these impartial and sophisticated projections, and governments and private sector players use them as a baseline for planning. These forecasts are particularly important for the resource-rich countries where NRGI works. Future revenues are inherently uncertain where there is a high reliance on natural resources, which makes government planning difficult.

In order to assess how countries have been coping with resource sector volatility and uncertainty, NRGI has created a tool to look back on previous WEO forecasts and compare those forecasts to actual outcomes. By combining the data from ten editions of the WEO, from 2009 to 2018, in the World Economic Outlook Forecast Tracker, it is possible to see how economies have changed alongside these important predictions.

The tool includes three distinct datasets: country level, country group level and commodity level. For the 193 countries and 15 country groupings, you can track the forecasts and historical values for over 20 economic indicators, such as inflation, government revenue and current account balance. In the commodity dataset, there are world-level prices and price forecasts for over 70 commodities, from crude oil to palm oil.

Once a dataset, country and indicator are selected, a plot will appear. This can be viewed as an animation and hovered on to show specific data points. The data is also available for download or viewing in the app. A gif animation of plot can also be downloaded.

Please contact NRGI economic analyst David Mihalyi ([email protected]) or research and data associate Tommy Morrison ([email protected]) for feedback on the tool or findings.