If you want to get on the front page of the
BBC website and all over the news one morning then run an economic forecasting model with all the spurious accuracy and doubtful assumptions about our ability to predict economic behaviour that this implies. That is precisely what the
National Institute for Economic and Social Research has achieved with the release of their latest forecast. In 2011, you might like to know, growth in net trade will contribute 1% to economic growth – or if you want the decimal point 1.2%. How do they know? I don’t think they do.