FORECASTING FOR AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURE

The paper provides a review of the objectives of forecasts and of the techniques for generating forecasts in the context of agriculture. Forecasts provide information to facilitate decision making. The techniques are evaluated in terms of assumptions about the processes generating the forecast variables, their relative requirements for time, data and other resources, and their relative forecast accuracy. An evaluation of naive, informal model and econometric model forecasts of Australian agricultural commodity prices and production levels is reported