The Success of Business Forecasting: Comparisons across Industries, Countries and Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study assesses the accuracy of forecasts by industry branches. Such an investigation provides a perspective on the relative benefits of forecasting in different industries. Accuracy of forecasting is assessed by econometrically investigating expectations data on firms’ production drawn from surveys covering manufacturing. Such data is available for only few countries and few historical periods. We study U.S. data covering the 1980s and German data over the period from 1991 to 2018. We first present rankings of industries according to forecast accuracy for both countries. Then the historical gap between the two countries’ data set is put to use to assess the stability and the dynamics in the relevance of forecasting in different branches of industry. We identify several industries that – across time and place – are among the most (e.g., electric machinery) and least accurate forecasters (e.g., the food industry). By contrast in some industries forecasting performance appear to undergo noticeable changes over time: the reported evidence suggests that forecasting has lost some of its potential in the printing and textile industries while gaining over time in the nonelectric machinery and in the metals industry. The findings can help management to make decisions regarding the allocation of resources to forecasting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".