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As of today, the CFP is making available the archive “Back to the Future: A database of macroeconomic and fiscal projections for the Portuguese economy in the 21st century” that brings together, in an exhaustive and organized way, the macroeconomic and budgetary projections released by the main national and international reference institutions and bodies since the year 2000. This database will be regularly updated.

 

This groundbreaking initiative to compile and create a centralised database is a digital tool that facilitates fast, free and systematic access, in a single location, to a set of information that is currently dispersed and sometimes in a format that is difficult to access. This is a service that no other institution in Portugal has provided until now. 

 

This repository presents, in an exhaustive way, the history of the entire set of annual projections prepared by these six institutions for a key set of twelve macroeconomic variables. These variables correspond to real GDP and its components of expenditure (private consumption, public consumption, investment (GFCF)), exports of goods and services and imports of goods and services), the GDP deflator, inflation rate  and nominal GDP, and the evolution of the labor market (employment, unemployment rate and apparent labor productivity). Four fiscal variables (overall budget balance, primary balance, interest on government debt and consolidated government debt stock), presented as a percentage of GDP are also included. 

 

The information currently dispersed in 353 individual publications was aggregated. Of these, 99 belong to the Bank of Portugal; 59 to the Ministry of Finance; 55 to the European Commission; 68 to the International Monetary Fund; 51 to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; and 21 to the Portuguese Public Finance Council (CFP), which has been publishing its own macroeconomic and fiscal projections since March 2015.

 

Accessible through an interactive interface in digital format, this file will also be an important source of information for the academic community, especially in the area of research and evaluation of the quality and accuracy of projections. The data will be disseminated in CSV and Excel formats and the information will be graphically represented through different configurations, having been built an interactive interface in Excel in which the user can use various filters.

 

The graphical representation also includes the construction of a composite indicator that allows the weighted evolution of the projections to be visualized, for different years, and for each variable, in real time. A first approach to this methodology has already been disclosed in Box 2 of the “Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2024-2028 (Update)". Another relevant contribution is also included for those who follow the evolution of the expectations of economic agents: two composite indicators, which consider, over time, the evolution of the projections for t+1 (following year) and t+2 (two years ahead), and can be extracted from them information on the expected evolution, with a more cyclical or more tendential tendency, for the various different variables.

 

The article ‘Back to the Future: A database of macroeconomic and fiscal projections for the Portuguese economy in the 21st century’ published on Contraciclo, the CFP's blog, presents a case study of the application of this database's more interactive interface, focusing on a recent episode: the 2022 and 2023 inflationary crisis.

Date of last update: 11/12/2024

News . 11 December 2024