Forecasting Net

I am a great fan of Dan Brown. I have read all of his books and enjoyed every single one of them! Great fiction and storytelling. Most of all, I always admired Brown's capacity to fuse fantastic elements with actual historical or scientific facts. This is why I decided to test his last-and one of my favorite-books, the “Inferno”.

Before we procee...

Although the history and implications of the Cold War between the US and the USSR are well documented, it is still not quite clear why it ended up as it did, with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and a clear win for the US.

Using a methodology presented in the recent post, “What makes our world and the economy tick?”...

The ancient Greek civilization emerged during the 8th century BC, almost out of nowhere, reaching a peak point in just three centuries, the Golden Age of Pericles in the 5th century BC that is still considered one of the most brilliant moments of human history.

Although the marvels of Ancient Greece are common knowledge today, it is still not quite clear what triggered this important period of development.

By using a methodology prese...

As the Second Economic Adjustment Program for Greece is soon coming to an end, there is a growing debate about the impact of the agreed austerity measures, whether the economic recession is finally over, and, most of all, what the next day may be.

In order to evaluate the course and future potential of the Greek economy, in terms of GDP value and growth levels, we used a double

As the number of reported cases of the recent Ebola virus outbreak is continuously rising, so is the concern of the people and public officials about the possible duration and severity of the deadly epidemic.

In order to estimate the evolution of the disease, we used the s-curve model an...

This book is a stand-alone sequel to Theodore Modis’s ground-breaking book Predictions: Society’s Telltale Signature Reveals the Past and Forecasts the Future (Simon & Schuster, 1992). In addition to confronting the predictions made 20 years ago with actual data-something forecasters generally ref...

China’s recent growth frenzy should not be a surprise. Its economy has been one of the largest in the world in the last two thousand years, reaching a peak point near the beginning of the 19th century, accounting for almost one third of the global economy at the time. However, by the mid-20th century the Chinese Empire and its economy collapsed to a mere 5% contribution to global GDP only to rise again after Deng Xiaoping assumed power in 1977. Key in understanding these econ...

Although it is common knowledge that the development of the past 500 years is based on a series of important discoveries that helped shape our modern civilization, we still don’t understand exactly how innovation adds value to the economy and, even more, how to quantify this relationship. This post will shed some light to the relationship between innovation and economic growth and help us understand how our decisions and efforts today may influence our future!

You can download the concluding report and original posts (Parts I-III) of the “The rise and fall of modern empires” series from the following links:

As we found out in Part I and Part II, although economic power has been shifting from the West to the East for many decades, income inequality still holds strong around the World. In

As we found out in Part I and Part II, although economic power has been shifting from the West to the East for many decades, income inequality, in terms of GDP per capita, still holds strong around the World. In Par...

It’s been four years since the still raging global economic crisis begun in 2008. Although our understanding of the crisis is getting better, we still don’t have a clear idea where the global economy is heading and what kind of growth (if any) we should be expecting in the future.

According to an article published by...

Contrary to popular belief that increased lending, first in the financial and corporate sector and then on a country level, is the key source of Europe’s problems, it turns out that this may be just the tip of the iceberg in a series of many structural problems, namely: reduced global influence, low growth, population ageing, reduced competitiveness against developing countries, increasing energy dependency, and loose coordination among participating countries. Overall, Europe...

You are walking on the street, en-route for meeting your girlfriend. You are late and should have already made reservations for lunch. Disaster? Not really! Your sunglasses-your latest gadget-takes care of everything: spotting the closest Italian restaurant-your girlfriend loves Italian cuisine, making reservations on-line and giving directions to you and your girlfriend-you both bought the same pair! One more thing to take care of and everything should be in order. You instruct your sunglass...

In this article*, published in Marketing Research Association’s Alert! magazine, Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations model, based on a simple s-curve, is explored as well as its numerous applications in marketing, business, and the economy. A case study of application to the global economy is offered as a proof of concept for the famous model.

Download the article

As we found out in Part I, economic power has been shifting from the West to the East for many decades. In Part II we explore the dynamics of income inequality through the years. We discover that it still holds strong, as full convergence is far away, despite considerable improvements in narrowing the income gap, especially between Asia and the West.

Recently, Frog, a well-known company in the high tech design market, released a list with the top 15 tech trends for 2012, according to the forecasting gurus of the company. This is an excellent link covering many aspects of our digital lives. My personal favorites ar...

Recently, LinkedIn released user statistics from as back as 2004 up to 2011. Apparently, the successful professional network has now more than 135 million accounts and keeps on growing at high rates. Since the number of users is one of the most important measures of the success of a social ...