Economic forecaster gauges our post-pandemic future

An economic forecaster offers insights into the economic fallout from the pandemic.

How many people will contract coronavirus this month? How will the stock market perform next quarter? Will you need an umbrella on Saturday? Given enough information, experts can build forecasting models to predict just about anything.

But even the best models are only as good as the data that are fed into them. That’s why Rajeev Dhawan, chair of economic forecasting and director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, spends a lot of time analyzing raw numbers to figure out the “signal-to-noise ratio.”

“In academic research, we tend to take data for granted,” he says. “My job is to separate the data that’s useful from the data that’s irrelevant or, worse, jamming up the signal with misleading information.”

“The pandemic is accelerating trends that were happening already.”

For example, at the beginning of each month the state of Georgia releases the amount of sales tax collected during the previous month. Although the state was shut down for 15 days in March, the report released in early April showed no significant decline in sales tax receipts.

“Did we spend so much in the first 15 days that we made it up? Common sense backed by observation says that’s unlikely,” says Dhawan. “The reality is that in March, retailers make payments on sales tax collected in the month of February. Knowing this timing detail is important if you want to really understand what’s happening in the state’s economy. To gauge the damage from the shutdown in March, you need to see the May report.”

Dhawan’s expertise as an economic forecaster has been in high demand during what is perhaps the most uncertain time in a century. Here, he discusses his perspective on the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and how he believes the next few months could play out:

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