Editorial

摘要

This double-issue contains 11 papers invited for the first special issue on "Computational methods for Russian economic and financial modelling". It was an attempt to explore and bring together practical, state-of-the-art applications of computational techniques with a particular focus on Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The response was beyond expectations and managed to cover a wide range of issues, so that a double-issue was considered: the first dealing with Finance and the second with Economics. Fantazzini and Fomichev propose a set of multivariate models, including both Google data and macroeconomic aggregates, which greatly improve the forecasting of the real price of oil. They show that models, including both Google data and macroeconomic aggregates statistically outperform the simple no-change forecast in the short term, while multivariate models including only Google data outperform the simple no-change forecast also for medium and long-term forecasts up to 24 steps ahead. In this perspective, using Google search data can be a simple and powerful way to summarise a large amount of information worldwide.