ABSTRACT
Throughout its life the Economic Section devoted much of its time to two regular tasks: surveying the current economic situation and forecasting how it would develop. The two things were to some extent inseparable. On the one hand, a comprehensive survey of current economic information was indispensable to the preparation of a forecast; on the other, the information available for a survey of the current situation was inconsistent, unreliable, or out-of-date so that it was necessary, as Robert Hall put it, ‘to forecast where we are now’. Indeed, the most trustworthy way of assessing current trends on the basis of available data of mixed reliability was often to effect a reconciliation between conflicting information in the form of a forecast and job backwards.
