The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature on United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast evaluation and critically assess their methods and findings. The fundamental characteristics of optimal forecasts are bias, accuracy and efficiency as well as encompassing and informativeness. This review revealed that the findings of these studies can be very different based on the forecasts examined, commodity, sample period, and methodology. Some forecasts performed very well, while others were not very reliable, resulting in forecast specific optimality record. We discuss methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.
