Here is just a brief preview of our upcoming issue of The Oracle, the IIF’s online newsletter:

Dear participants of the 34th International Symposium on Forecasting,

It has been our great pleasure that we could welcome you to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for this great conference in June/July.  After having attended many of these conferences in the past, we were delighted that this year our city of Rotterdam was your host. Rotterdam is the home of the most important harbor of Western Europe, home of Erasmus University, home of three professional football teams, and the home of a large array of events and cultural activities. Yet still, we have chosen the conference venue such that almost everything is within walking distance. We had hoped for good weather and that turned out to be the case. But even then, on Wednesday morning, the days after the gala event, we could still see almost all delegates at the conference venue. This year we had a range of high-quality plenary speakers and a large group of forecasting academics and professionals did find their way to Rotterdam for the conference. There were 83 sessions, over 350 participants, and about 200 delegates who enjoyed the boat tour.

The theme of this year’s conference concerned the past, present and future of economic forecasting. We have chosen this theme because the academic host, the Erasmus School of Economics, celebrates its first centennial. Founded in 1913, the School is the number one place to go for academic education in Economics and Econometrics in the Netherlands. Starting with a small number of first year undergraduate students back then, the School now hosts 5500 undergraduate students (bachelor and master), and facilitates 300 scholars in their academic research and teaching. With this conference, we have now ended our celebrations of our first 100 years. We hope that you have enjoyed the conference and Rotterdam as much as we did.

Before closing I would like to thank Mohsen Hamoudia, Haiyan Song and, in particular, Pam Stroud for excellent support from the IIF. I would also like to thank the members of the Program Committee;  Dick van Dijk, Graham Elliott, Paul Goodwin, Robin Lumsdaine and Michel van der Wel for their great help with the composition of the program, and Marije Stofregen for excellent onsite support. Finally, I would like to thank our sponsors of the event, that is, Elsevier, SAS, Fourworkx, APG (All Pensions Group), and Robeco.

With very best wishes

on behalf of the organizing team,

Philip Hans Franses, General Chair

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