Matei Demetrescu, Christoph Roling, and Anna Titova, "Re-evaluating the 
Prudence of Economic Forecasts in the EU: The Role of Instrument 
Persistence", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2021, pp. 
151-161.

Since the paper is aimed to replicate and extend the work of

  George A. Christodoulakis and Emmanuel C. Mamatzakis ("Assessing the 
  Prudence of Economic Forecasts in the EU", Journal of Applied 
  Econometrics, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2009, pp. 583-606),

the data description is kept in accordance to their original work.

There are 10 data files, which are ASCII files in DOS format. They are 
all zipped in the file drt-files.zip. This file also includes an R
program, alpha_estim.R, which is mostly the same as the original Matlab 
program cm-prog.m, slightly updated and adapted for R.

The dataset concerns current-year and one-year-ahead annual forecasts,
generated by the European Commission, for twelve member states and the
EU as a whole for five macroeconomic variables (inflation,
unemployment, government balance, investment, current account), over
the period 1970-2018. The dataset is not balanced, since member states
have joined the EU in different time periods. It is publicly available
from the web site of the European Commission.

The data are stored in ten text files with total size about 100 kb.
They are named according to variables, with the name ending in 0 for 
current-year forecasts and 1 for one-year-ahead forecasts. Rows store 
years, starting in 1969 for the curren-year forecasts, and 1970 for 
the year-ahead forecast. Columns store variables as follows. The first
and second columns store the forecast and realization, respectively,
for Belgium. The third and forth columns store the data for Denmark.
The remaining columns store data for Germany, Greece, Spain, France, 
Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Portugal, UK, and the EU in
the same format.