Forecasting in turbulent times

Since the beginning of this century, the global economy has been hit by a series of unforeseen shocks, including the Global Financial Crisis, the euro area's sovereign debt crisis, and most recently, the global inflation surge. To motivate this special issue, we provide a brief overview of recent methods that have been proposed to improve the ability of forecast models to predict shocks and to capture their effects once they have occurred. We also propose a method that may allow central banks to respond more quickly to the kind of inflationary surge that occurred from 2020 to 2022 so that those banks would not have misdiagnosed the surge as a temporary phenomenon.