Modeling Belarus

Abstract

The report has three chapters. Chapter 1 presents the structural macroeconomic model, its changes compared to the May 2010 version, and its properties captured by impulseresponse functions and by variance decompositions of model’s variables in terms of the model shocks. Important is the part on the model-consistent interpretation of the recent economic history of Belarus. The section describing Bayesian vector autoregressions used for the near-term forecasting concludes. Chapter 2 evaluates how the models perform empirically. The forecasting power is assessed using both in-sample and out-of-sample comparisons with the random-walk benchmark. We conclude that the FPAS performs satisfyingly in this comparison. The last chapter provides an overview of the considerable country database that has been compiled