September 15-26, 2025

From September 15 to 26, 2025, 30 officials from China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan, gathered in Dalian to participate in the course on Macroeconometric Forecasting and Analysis. This course was jointly organized with the National Bureau of Statistics, and was presented by Victor Pontines, Victoria Petrenko, and John McDermott from the IMF Institute for Capacity Development (ICD).

The course aimed to provide government officials in central banks, ministries, and public research institutions with a rigorous foundation in the estimation of macro-econometric models and their application for nowcasting, forecasting, and policy analysis. It covered topics including autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, non-stationarity and unit roots, vector autoregressive (VAR) models, structural VAR (SVAR), vector error correction models (VECM), nowcasting, Kalman filter, dynamic factor models (DFM), and forecast evaluation and combination. With an emphasis on practicality and peer learning, the course also involved hand-on sessions using EViews, and a final project working with Asian country data (e.g. Maldives, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) to recreate the challenges and constraints faced in their work.