July 10, 2001

Each time we review the Wall Street Journal's semiannual survey of economists' forecasts, we take the average of the individual forecasts as a measure the consensus forecast. From this extraction, we then determine when an individual forecast is significantly different from that of the consensus. This way we can better understand each forecast separately and value it accordingly (perhaps "value" is an inappropriate word - who are we to value another economist's forecast, particularly among this group - let's say we will be able to "assess" their forecasts accordingly). In the appendix we describe our methodology for calculating the consensus, the forecaster style as well as how to identify individual forecasts that are significantly different from the consensus.

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