Summary
This paper examines tax revenue projections in Germany for the period 1968 to 2012 with a focus on forecasting rationality. It is shown that tax revenue forecasts for the medium-term are upward biased. Overoptimistic revenue projections are particularly pronounced after the German reunification and reflect upward-biased GDP projections in this period. The predicted tax-GDP-ratio appears to be upward biased, as well. The forecasts are likely to overestimate tax revenues if the predicted tax-GDP-ratio exceeds its structural level of approximately 22½ percentage points. The results also indicate that forecast errors of short-term projections for the current year exhibit serial correlation. It is conceivable that the non-rational behaviour can be traced back to the specific institutional setting of revenue forecasting and budgetary planning in Germany.
Code and Datasets
The author(s) published code and data associated with this article in the ZBW Journal Data Archive, a storage platform for datasets. See: https://doi.org/10.15456/jbnst.2015176.150325.
© 2015 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart