A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics
Modeling major economic events for your strategic planning
Wouldn't business life be easier if we didn't have to worry about future calamities? If we could just gather up the data on what's happened already and what's happening now, then create a perfect strategic plan for what we want to happen in the future...
In such an idyllic world, we'd only need to press the start button on our plan and let it run without a thought about the potential for a severe recession in the US, a sudden tightening of credit in China, or yet another oil price shock. We wouldn't need to plan for such contingencies as a Disorderly Brexit, a Grexit, or even the seemingly positive news of a major upturn in the economy of a nearby nation.
That isn't, of course, the world we live in. As important as it is to research past and current trends, our strategies must also consider possible future macroeconomic scenarios -- the What-Ifs that keep us awake at night.
I've written in the past about the resources that offer forecasts on economic trends (e.g., this post on forecasts about the CAN-US exchange rate), but the dream resource is one that will provide an estimate as to the likelihood of various situations developing and that will allow us to model the effects of multiple issues on a single country's economy.
With that preamble in mind, consider the new Macro Model feature in our Passport database: This interactive (and somewhat addictive) tool allows you to tap into the expertise of the Euromonitor team behind Passport to forecast such things as...
- the impact on Canada's GDP of a slowdown throughout most advanced economies;
- the spillover effect on unemployment rates in Mexico of a major downturn in the US in Q3 this year; and
- the effect on inflation in Japan of a rise in the price of oil to $55.00 USD in Q1 of 2017;
- plus you can chart the complex interaction of multiple scenarios on multiple countries at once.
Accessing this macroeconomic modeling tool:
Go to Passport via the SFU Library, choose Economies along the top navigation bar, then choose Economy, Finance and Trade, then click on the blue Macro Model box. Be patient! It can take a minute to load.
Want to learn more about the many uses of our Passport database? Check out these BUEC Buzz posts.
-- MarkB
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Mark Bodnar
Economics & Business Librarian
mbodnar@sfu.ca