Macroeconomic projections aim to predict and understand the future state of the economy on a broad scale. They include information related to economic growth, inflation, wages, unemployment, trade and a number of other macroeconomic variables.
Eurosystem and ECB staff produce macroeconomic projections that cover the outlook for the euro area and the wider global economy. These contribute to the ECB Governing Council’s assessment of economic developments and risks to price stability.
They are published four times a year (in March, June, September and December). The June and December projections are conducted by Eurosystem staff and include (with a two-week delay) a national breakdown for real GDP, inflation and unemployment. The March and September projections are conducted by ECB staff and are published only for the euro area. For more information, please refer to the projections article published on the ECB website.
Projection exercises refer to: March (code: W), June (code: G), September (code: S), December (code: A)
Vintage projection exercises are available from March 1999 (W99) onwards.
Time series start in 1995. The projection horizon covers the current year of the projection exercise + two years ahead (e.g. March 2020 ->2022), except for December projection rounds, for which the horizon is expanded for one year (e.g. December 2020 -> 2023). Note that prior to 2016 the projection horizon was expanded in the March round.
Time series are available at annual frequency, GDP and HICP are also available at quarterly frequency for the euro area only.
For all variables except HICP, the euro area (code: U2) refers to the euro area composition at the time of the projection exercise. For the two projection exercises preceding an expansion of the euro area (in September (S) and December(A)) the euro area data refer to the future euro area composition e.g. Lithuania joined the euro area in January 2015 but was included in the September & December 2014 projection exercises. The euro area refers to a fixed composition time series (i.e. the entire time series refers to the same composition of euro area countries).
For the HICP the euro area instead is constructed on a changing composition basis referring to the countries which were members of the euro area at each point in time.
Historical data, for each projection exercise, may differ from that available from Eurostat at the time of the projection exercise due to different projection cut-off dates and (in some cases) different methodologies. Note that especially for some smaller countries, historical national accounts data is subject to sizable revisions and this can lead to the volatility of the staff projections from one projection exercise to the next.
Except for HICP, annual data for most countries and the euro area, is constructed from seasonally and working day adjusted quarterly data.
Euro area and euro area member states.
Projection rounds from March 1999 (Winter) to current exercise;
Time series: 1995 to end of projection horizon
Staff Macroeconomic Projections are produced four times;
Time series: annual and quarterly frequency
For information about the naming convention (series key dimensions and metadata), refer to the MPD underlying DSD (ECB_MPD1) maintained by the ECB.
MPD - Macroeconomic Projection Database
ECB and Eurosystem
The data is disseminated to the SDW at the same time as the following the publication of the projections article on the ECB website , which is published after the monetary policy meetings of the Governing Council (in March, June, September and December). The national projections are published only for the June and December projections two weeks after the euro area projections are published.
Download the series catalogue containing a full list of series and associated metadata of the dataset MPD in CSV format (zipped)