NABET, NABET 2018 Conference

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FORECASTING GDP AND UNEMPLOYEMENT IN BERKS COUNTY, PA, USA
Muhammed Dalgin, Abdulwahab Sraiheen

Last modified: 2018-10-02

Abstract


In this paper we develop a parsimonious Structural VAR model to forecast Berks County GDP and unemployment, and output of eleven sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, etc. Availability of small number of years and variables that can be used to do the forecasting limits to model to admit very few VAR variables and lags. In each sector of the local economy, according to various criteria such as forecasting mean square error, we pick the best performing model and use it to forecast the output and unemployment in the sector for the next three years. We also include a couple of exogenous variables such as federal funds rate, interest rate spread, inflation, in accordance with the structural VAR model in order to anchor our forecasts. Overall the performance of the forecast looks good. This forecasting exercise is useful for the industrial planners as the county level GDP data is only made available with a two-year lag although unemployment data made available monthly and comes only with a few months lag.