A New-Keynesian DSGE model for forecasting the South African economy

Abstract

This paper develops a New-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NKDSGE) model for forecasting the growth rate of output, inflation, and the nominal short-term interest rate (91 days Treasury Bill rate) for the South African economy. The model is estimated via maximum likelihood technique for quarterly data over the period of 1970:1-2000:4. Based on a recursive estimation using the Kalman filter algorithm, out-of-sample forecasts from the NKDSGE model are compared with forecasts generated from the classical and Bayesian variants of vector autoregression (VAR) models for the period 2001:1-2006:4. The results indicate that in terms of out-of-sample forecasting, the NKDSGE model outperforms both the classical and Bayesian VARs for inflation, but not for output growth and nominal short-term interest rate. However, differences in RMSEs are not significant across the models.