The Role of Age-Structured Data for Economic Growth Forecasts

This paper utilizes for the first time age-structured human capital data for economic growth forecasting. We concentrate on pooled cross-country data from 58 countries over six five-year periods between 1970 and 2000. We consider specifications chosen by model selection criteria, Bayesian model averaging methodologies based on in-sample and out-of-sample goodness of fit, and on adaptive regression by mixing. The results indicate that forecast averaging and exploiting the demographic dimension of education data improve economic growth forecasts significantly.