Exponential forecasting of the monthly volume of the tourism receipts in Bulgaria

Abstract

In Compliance with the annual Act for the State Budget, the
Bulgarian Ministry of Finance usually makes twice a year an
internal budget restructuring in the budgets of the separate
Ministries and State Agencies of the Bulgarian State. What is in
intriguing in this internal budget restructuring is that it is usually
done in the months when the tourism receipts in the form of Value
Added Tax turnovers are usually accumulated by the Bulgarian the
tax administration. The need of proper forecasts that could
eventually justify or reject such a hidden harvesting policy has
never been examined and put to the public attention. The present
paper regards several major problems in the application of the
exponential smoothing methods for the purpose of the long-run
forecasting of the monthly volume of the tourism receipts in
Bulgaria. These problems include: (i) the problem of determining
the time series pattern; or the so-called “forecast profile”; (ii) the
selection of a suitable forecasting method; (iii) Calculating of shortrun
and long-run forecasts; (iv) the comparison of the results of the
forecast techniques on the basis of the errors in the forecasts. As a
result the Holt-Winters method is applied with the conclusion that
the produced forecasts could trigger a process a more financially
autonomous national tourism administration that will allow a
greater part of the collected tax revenues for the tourism sector to
be returned into the tourism industry in a form of public
investments through this very same more autonomous national
tourism administration.