Risk and Uncertainty: Macroeconomic Perspective

The paper discusses main concepts and definitions related to macroeconomic uncertainty as operational concept. It proposes classifications of uncertainty according to areas of application and measurements. Properties of different methodologies of assessing uncertainty used in empirical analysis are discussed. The paper also analyses positive and negative aspects of particular methods and illustrates one of the most relevant problems, which is the biasness of the experts’ based assessments, by the analysis of the National Bank of Poland Survey of Professional Forecasters. A simple uncertainty indicator based on forecast errors for the analysis of inflation uncertainty in Poland is computed and evaluated.