'Economic Forecasting: Past, Present and Future'- MU at the 34th International Symposium on Forecasting

Jan Peter Balkenende, Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

The International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF) is the leading forecasting conference attracting the world’s leading forecasting researchers, practitioners, and students. Three faculty members from the Department of Tourism and Service Management attended the annual conference in Rotterdam, the Netherlands between June 29th and July 2nd.

This year’s theme was ‘’Economic Forecasting: Past, Present and Future’’ and featured 270 presentations from 40 different countries, covering topics such as energy consumption forecasting, time series models, nowcasting, judgmental forecasting, and seasonality.

MU’s Prof. Dr. Egon Smeral, Dr. Ulrich Gunter and Dr. Irem Önder presented their latest research; Dr. Önder and Dr. Gunter spoke on their investigations into the local market in “Forecasting Tourism demand with Google Trends: The case of Vienna” and Prof. Dr. Smeral and Dr. Gunter presented their internationally-minded study “Varying Tourism Demand Elasticities In A Global Context: The Influence Of Different Medium-term Growth Periods”.

High profile keynote speakers were invited to speak each day: Jan Peter Balkenende, Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, gave a talk on “Europe, a Great History, also a Great Future?”, John Geweke  Distinguished Research Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, discussed forecasting with Big Data and its challenges, Raffaella Giacomini Associate Professor of Economics, University College, London, presented on “Economic theory and forecasting: some lessons from the literature“, Angelien Kemna from CIO APG Group talked about forecasting for pension investment and Jos Nijhuis, CEO, Schiphol Group, used the example of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in his speech “Mainport as a system”.