Forecasting Annual Inflation with Power Transformations: The Case of Inflation Targeting Countries
La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.
This paper investigates whether transforming the Consumer Price Index with a class of power transformations lead to an improvement of inflation forecasting accuracy. We use one of the prototypical models to forecast short run inflation which is known as the univariate time series ARIMA . This model is based on past inflation which is traditionally approximated by the difference of logarithms of the underlying consumer price index. The common practice of applying the logarithm could damage the forecast precision if this transformation does not stabilize the variance adequately. In this paper we investigate the benefits of incorporating these transformations using a sample of 28 countries that has adopted the inflation targeting framework. An appropriate transformation reduces problems with estimation, prediction and inference. The choice of the parameter is done by bayesian grounds.
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not of the Banco de la República de Colombia nor of its Board.
