Revenue Forecasting Lectures

These are the Powerpoint presentations that I used for a short 3-week course in revenue forecasting presented to Ministry of Finance officials in several Latin American countries on behalf of the Office of Technical Assistance of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The format of the course was to have a theoretical presentation in the morning followed by an afternoon applied hands-on workshop. A key feature of the workshop was that each of the participants had their own laptop loaded with EViews and they were able to apply the skills learned in the morning by working through problems using data from their own country. In the last week of the course, the participants were divided into groups and assigned specific tax revenues for which to develop forecasting equations. At the end of the course, a preliminary revenue forecasting model had been developed for all the main revenue sources.

I relied heavily in preparing the lectures on Peter Kennedy, A Guide to Econometrics (2003). Almost alone among econometric texts, it provides intuitive explanations of complex econometric estimation techniques. It also contains some useful graphs that were incorporated in the presentations. The participants, who were not native English speakers, relied on Ursicino Carrascal Arranz, Analisis Econometrico Con Eviews (2001) for descriptive material on EViews in Spanish.

ECONOMETRIC TECHNIQUES FOR REVENUE FORECASTING USING EVIEWS