Group Economics has the best forecasters in the Netherlands

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  • Economy

“We’re great, of course, but still, you’re only as good as your most recent forecast.” Jan-Paul van de Kerke brushes off the question of whether the Dutch Team of ABN AMRO’s Group Economics are in fact the best forecasters. They recently won “The Consensus Economics 2020 Forecast Accuracy Award for the Netherlands”: essentially, the Dutch Team predicted the Dutch economy with the greatest accuracy in 2020.

What made your forecasts the best?

“We’d already won the award back in 2017, but forecasting has evolved since then,” explainsNora Neuteboom, one of Jan-Paul’s colleagues at Group Economics. “Until a year ago we had Nico Klene, who had forty years of experience and who kept us strong. His expert view was unparalleled, but it was our vulnerability too. Now that he’s retired and passed on what he knows, we’ve turned forecasting into a collective and more quantity-based activity. We’ve also added an important new indicator: real-time PIN transactions.”

For the past year or so, the economists have had access to their Holy Grail: real-time PIN transactions. This development is incredibly exciting for them. Together with CADM (Chief Architect & Data Management) they can now follow every single development in the economy as it happens.

CADM’s people dig through the PIN data; the economists run analyses based on quantitativemodels and their expert views. “We can track the economy almost in real time, whereas in the past we had to wait for consumer spending data from Statistics Netherlands. This is a huge boost for the quality of our forecasts, and the perceptions of the expertise involved,” says Nora.

So will you win the award again next year?

“We’ll do our best,” Nora and Jan-Paul reply in unison. “While this award offers no guarantees for the future, our new approach of using real-time data brings the guarantee of more accurate forecasts closer. Of course the competition is not standing still either,” Jan-Paul concludes.