Selected Issues in Macroeconomic & Regional Modeling

This volume brings together eighteen studies on macroeconomic and regional modelling, dedicated to founding of the Macroeconomic Modelling Seminar of the Romanian Academy. All authors participated -- at one time or another -- in its business activity. The first section is a collection of studies devoted to research on macroeconomics considered as a branch of economics that characterise the behaviour of an economy as a whole. These studies focus on issues raised by modelling and forecasting aggregated indicators, such as industrial production, GDP growth rate, and price indexes (exchange rate, inflation) to understand how the economy functions. Exchange rate is one of the most important macroeconomic variables, especially in recent decades when the openness of the economies has grown due to the fact that development is based on competitiveness and international trade, and thus exposed them to exchange rate risk. Understanding underlying trends of inflation, focusing on expectations and the interaction among inflation, output growth and respective uncertainties are important problems in emerging countries, where the inflation is considered to be one of the main phenomena of instability of the economic environment, and the uncertainty about future inflation can lead to uncertainty about other economic variables. These contributions from the researchers affiliated with the Macroeconomic Modelling Seminar gathered in this section propose some perspectives on these issues, emphasising how econometric techniques can be used to model macroeconomic variables and how to capture uncertainty, structural breaks determined by the integration of Romania into EU, and/or by the latest major economic crises. Several issues are hence considered, each emphasising some aspects of the theme proposed: (i) forecasting exchange rate based on monetary fundamentals; (ii) capture uncertainties; (iii) understanding underlying trends of inflation, focusing on expectations; and (iv) assessing forecast accuracy for underlying models. Performing analysis only at an aggregate level tends to obscure valuable information regarding regional disparities in terms of resources, economic development, socio-economic conditions. Therefore, there is a need to broaden the picture from national to regional in order to identify regional vulnerabilities, which is acknowledged by the articles from the second section of the volume. The methodological section, the third and final volume, assembles some contributions that address specific issues about: (i) the measurement of jumps in high frequency data; (ii) the application of multiple attribute decision making models; (iii) the identification of the collinearity in regression models; (iv) the usefulness of Onicescu information energy together with the Shannon entropy to measure nominal variables; and (v) methodological advancements in the estimation of potential output.