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. There are 10 data files, which are ASCII files in DOS format. They are all zipped in the file cm-files.zip. This file also includes a Matlab program, cm-prog.m. Unix users should use "unzip -a". 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 1970-2004. 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 50 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 1970. 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.