By using forecasts businesses may derive competitive advantage. New opportunities on the market may be recognised and entrepreneurial adaptations can be made. Exact forecasts are an essential input not only for private firms, but also for public authorities i.e. forecasts of future revenues and expenditurs for an efficient and flexible administration.

The GEFRA developed and installed forecast models for various applications. In the end every forecast bases on experiences made in the past. However, the choice of measure is crucial: intuitiv or formal. Naive methods extrapolate the past in a simple way and therefore result in incorrect forecasts at changed global framework. Formal methods allow for anticipation of changed parameters and may use this information for the forecast by considering the causes of the changes in the past. After all, understanding past events is the only key, which we have to look into the future.

Recently, application-oriented econometrics experienced important expansions on new procedures for the analysis of stationary and non-stationary data series („ARCH-models“, „cointegration analysis“) and the dynamic analysis of panel datat („GMM-estimator“). These methods are applied in the research of the GEFRA for various questions in micro and macro economics.