Forecasting United States–Asia international message telephone service

This study compares forecasts of US international message telephone service (IMTS) traffic using several relative mean squared error statistics. The forecasts are obtained from time-series extrapolation, univariate autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), error correction and vector autoregressive models. The models are estimated on annual US IMTS outgoing traffic data for six US–Asia bilateral markets for the period 1964 to 1993. No single approach provides best forecasts. However, forecast evolution statistics indicate that econometric models generally outperform the alternatives.