Forecasting Saudi Arabia’s Non-Oil GDP Using a Bayesian Mixed Frequency VAR

Bayesian vector autoregressions have been used by central banks to prepare short-term projections of quarterly GDP and other macroeconomic variables. The Bayesian approach offers the advantage that a researcher can use a priori knowledge to specify a prior distribution of the parameters. In this paper, we have combined monthly data for Saudi Arabia with quarterly fiscal and GDP variables to produce forecasts over an approximate 12-month period.