Forecasting inflation in an inflation targeting economy : structural versus nonstructural models

Abstract

We propose a comparison between atheoretical and theoretical models in forecasting the inflation rate for an inflation-targeting country such as South Africa. In a pseudo real-time environment, our results show that for shorter horizons, the atheoretical error correction models, with and without factors, perform better; while for longer horizons, theoretical (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium-based) models outperform their competitors