Eurozone's Turnaround Forecasts Prove Wildly Unreliable

And getting worse

The European Commission promises a turnaround next year, when growth for the euro zone will bounce back to 1.2 percent, but that number has also been revised down from the 1.4 percent forecast previously.

So how seriously should we take these forecasts? Not very, according to research by Laura González Cabanillas and Alessio Terzi.

They found that the error margin on EU forecasts had increased substantially since the 2008 financial crisis.

The mean absolute error for current year growth forecasts for the 17 members of the euro zone was 0.4 percentage points between 1969 and 2011. The same number for all the 27 members of the European Union was 0.5 percentage points.