Forecasting the Term Structure of South African Government Bond Yields

This article uses the parsimonious dynamic Nelson–Siegel model to fit the yields of South African government bonds. We find that the dynamic Nelson–Siegel model has good fitting abilities for all maturities. We further forecast the term structure by seven different dynamic Nelson–Siegel models with time series models. We find that the DNS–VAR–GARCH model is useful for forecasting the short-term rates, the DNS–VAR best predicts the medium-term rates, and the DNS–RW best predicts the long-term rates. In addition, the dynamic Nelson–Siegel models provide better forecasts of yield data than a random walk model, especially for the 12-month forecasting horizons.