1. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Evaluation of Timber Committee Forecasts Goal: Improve response rate and forecast accuracy What is the response rate What is the accuracy of the forecasts

2. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Responses 2002-2004

3. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Response Completeness - forecast for current year

4. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Completeness of Response

5. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Responses to specific item – Sawn softwood and OSB

6. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Forecast Accuracy Constraints One set of forecasts (current and next year) to limit initial work Data sufficiently far back so that forecast years would have more or less final data – October 2002 One product – sawn softwood 31 replies to this item (although not every country forecast all 6 possible data points)

7. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Summary Statistics Bear in mind More detailed statistics available in attached paper (excluding dropped outliers) This is only for one product, one set of forecasts No weighting by size of country

8. Forecast Error Distribution - Exports

9. Forecast Error Distribution - Imports

10. Forecast Error Distribution - Production

11. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Significant errors What is a “significant” error? When the direction of the forecast is opposite to the actual outcome We used a cutoff of forecast >1% and actual 1%

12. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva “No change” forecasts What is a “no change” forecast? Where the forecast % change is between +0.5% and –0.5% Such a forecast could be the outcome of a careful process of consultation, estimation and modeling or simply rounding/repeating an earlier figure

13. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Are the forecasts better than guessing results of EAD analysis 5 of the 6 series analysed showed a close to normal distribution (the exception was 2002/2001 exports) The forecasts were better than random guessing in more than 80% of the cases (>86% for most series) Forecasts appear to be more conservative than warranted by random outcomes There is still room for improvement

14. Working Party on Forest Economics and Statistics 27 th Session, 22-24 March 2005, Geneva Future steps Analytical Cover earlier years (1997, 1987) to compare current forecast success with other periods Cover other products to see if trend in sawn softwood is representative (one roundwood, one panel) Accomplishing goals Reaching out to find more respondents Feedback to show how successful forecasts are, encourage forecasters to “risk” Training / networking to share knowledge and “best practice”