Eurozone: Forecast disagreement declines during the forecasted year... but not in 2025

Despite the announcement of the US-EU trade deal at the end of July, the short-term growth outlook for the Eurozone remains uncertain. This is well illustrated by the fact that professional economists, whose forecasts usually converge towards the end of the year, are currently continuing to disagree to a large extent about this year’s euro area growth.

Historically, growth forecasts in the ongoing year tend to converge as the year progresses. This is a feature, not a bug: as the year progresses, final quarterly GDP numbers get published. The result: fewer data points remain for forecasters to disagree on, which mechanically enforces convergence on their full-year outlooks. 2025 however, is different.

The times they are changing

To better understand forecast disagreement, we analysed an extensive set of professional forecasts, provided by Focus-Economics. This data includes individual GDP forecasts by over 130 financial institutions, think tanks, and other international organizations. The data set begins in October 2010 and runs up until August 2025. For each publication, we then calculated the average absolute paired forecast difference as a metric to gauge forecaster disagreement.

The chart plots the average disagreement during the pre-Covid period in our dataset (2013-2019). We have excluded the pandemic period (2020-2023) as the impact of lockdowns caused significant but often temporary spikes in the disagreement metric. The grey area indicates the interquartile range for these years, further cementing the trend of converging outlooks, particularly from the second half of the year.

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