The OECD Economic Outlook is the OECD’s twice-yearly analysis of the major economic trends and prospects for the next two years. The Outlook puts forward a consistent set of projections for output, employment, prices, fiscal and current account imbalances. Coverage is provided for all OECD member countries as well as for selected non-member countries.

The OECD Economic Outlook database is a comprehensive and consistent macroeconomic database of the OECD economies, covering expenditures, foreign trade, output, labour markets, interest and exchange rates, balance of payments, and government debt. For the non-OECD regions, foreign trade and current account series are available.

The database contains annual data for the projection period. Variables are defined in such a way that they are as homogenous as possible for the countries covered. Breaks in underlying series are corrected as far as possible. Sources for the historical data are national statistical agencies and OECD statistical publications such as the Quarterly National Accounts, the Annual National Accounts, the Annual Labour Force Statistics and the Main Economic Indicators. The cut-off date for information used in the compilation of the projections was the 14 November 2014.

.

With the OECD Economic Outlook 87, new aggregation techniques have been applied to construct the OECD area (34 countries) and the OECD euro area (15 OECD countries that are also members of Euro area). The new approach aims to better handle issues arising from evolving composition of these areas and different data availability across countries. The main changes are a switch from a fixed weighting scheme to moving weighting schemes for OECD and the direct aggregation of ratios, rather than computing them as ratios of aggregated components. Consequently, a number of series expressed in levels differ from the series previously published, while others are no longer available, particularly government and labour market data. Concerning the aggregation of world trade, a new composition has been introduced, since projections are now made for the major non-OECD economies. Thus, besides OECD and the OECD euro area, the following new regions are available: Dynamic Asian Economies (Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam); Oil Producers (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Brunei, Timor-Leste, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Algeria, Angola, Chad, Rep. of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, Sudan); with the remaining countries in a residual 'Rest of the World' group.

Since the 95 edition, all EU States have partly or entirely implemented ESA 2010 methodology (the European version of the 2008 System of national Accounts (SNA2008). In parallel to the implementation of SNA/ESA countries are also updating their balance of payments statistics to the sixth edition of the balance of payments and International Investment Position Manual (BPM6). The EO96 online dataset includes, where available, the revised information. For more details, please refer to the time series metadata.
In the context of the OECD Economic Outlook exercise, historical data are based on national sources to take into account the more relevant indicator and structural breaks in data are often adjusted to produce smooth series with the uses of splicing and other techniques. As a result, EO data can differ from other sources with official data including the OECD's National Accounts, Main Economic Indicators and Employment Outlook.
Moreover, data before 1980 should be used with caution. In most cases quarterly data refer to quarterly information, but may especially in the past result from intepolation of annual figures.