Oxford Economics: Leader in Economic Forecasting and Advisory Global 2026
Oxford Economics began in 1981 around one of the first commercially available global macro models, and the model remains the core of the business. Chief executive Innes McFee describes it not just as mathematics but as a consistent framework in which to think, somewhere to order possible outcomes and test assumptions when information outruns the capacity to weigh it.
Independence here is structural rather than asserted. The firm is privately owned, and its clients include multinationals, investors, governments and central banks, constituencies whose preferred answers cannot all be true at once. Giving any one of them the answer it wants, McFee says, would not be possible even if the firm tried.
More than 450 economists and analysts work from over 20 offices, the Japan economist in Japan, the Mexico economist in Mexico, all running the same model. The result is a globally consistent view resolved to sector, city and sub-national geography, which matters because few businesses are driven by national GDP: a US client may operate in two states, and California and Texas are not the same economy.
That modelling investment buys speed. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Oxford Economics sent clients a note the same morning setting out the shocks, their modelled implications, and how clients could run them for themselves. The same is done ahead of elections and referendums, so alternative outcomes are costed before they arrive.
On AI the firm has kept the reins deliberately short. AskOE, its agent for surfacing research, forecasts and data, took months of internal testing before release, is not permitted to transform data on its own account, and returns answers linked to the underlying research and the economist who wrote it. McFee doubts AI can produce a good forecast at all, and treats automation’s dividend as time returned to economists for the judgement it cannot supply.
The Capital Finance International (CFI.co) Judging Panel congratulates Oxford Economics on winning the Leader in Economic Forecasting and Advisory Global 2026 Award.
