Arun Raha, former Executive Director of the state Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, has been named top economic forecaster for 2012 by the Wall Street Journal. From the WSJ’s Real Time Economics blog:

Arun Raha of power-management company Eaton Corp. was the year’s top economic forecaster, according to the Wall Street Journal’s annual rankings.

The rankings are based on predictions made last January about how inflation, unemployment, interest rates and economic output would fare over the course of the year. Mr. Raha, who was at the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council when he made his predictions last year, had a near perfect score in the Journal’s methodology developed by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. (Download the full rankings here.) …

Mr. Raha took the top spot due in large part to his pretty much spot-on inflation predictions. His forecast for 8% unemployment for the fourth quarter was a little higher than the actual of 7.8%, and his 2.1% prediction for year-over-year gross domestic product growth was a little too strong. “I think GDP was a little bit weaker than I forecast because of the special circumstances in the fourth quarter,” he said. Indeed, a steep cutback in defense spending and a slower rate of restocking surprised economists, and made full-year GDP look weaker than economists were expecting.