Central Bank of Brazil awards Top 5 Focus prizes to 16 institutions for 2025 forecasting accuracy

The Central Bank of Brazil has awarded certificates to sixteen institutions that placed first in the annual 2025 Top 5 rankings of market expectations published through its Focus Report Market Expectations System, recognising forecasts that most closely matched realised outcomes. Awards covered projections for IPCA inflation and its components, the exchange rate, the Selic rate, unemployment, GDP and its components, and fiscal-sector variables. The certificates were presented at an event in São Paulo, followed by discussions on the international and domestic outlook, inflation and monetary policy. The Central Bank also reiterated that Focus expectations submitted by banks, asset managers and other participants inform Monetary Policy Committee (Copom) decisions and feed models used by its Department of Studies and Research (Depep). The Central Bank outlined that short-term Top 5 rankings are published monthly and evaluated with a lag of around one month, while medium-term rankings are published quarterly and based on average forecast accuracy for a quarter using projections from the prior quarter. Annual short- and medium-term rankings aggregate performance across the monthly and quarterly exercises, and long-term rankings for the current and following year are published in the first quarter and assess accuracy across forecasts submitted over twelve months.