Comparison of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods to Predict Price of Wheat in Iran

One of the requirements of planning for the future is predict the behavior of economic variables. Since wheat is a strategic commodity for our country, forecasting its price is very important. In previous studies in Iran, researchers have used quantitative models to forecasting the price of wheat and they have not used qualitative models. But in present research, we use both of them. The annual data for period of 1976-2014 are included. The results of the study indicat that RMSE criterion for quantitative models such as ARMA, EGARCH and ANN are 37625.68, 39373.91 and 24258.073, respectively. On the other hand, the average percent difference between the forecasting of ANN and Delphi method is 0.08. So, the results show that prediction error of the neural network model compared to other methods is smaller and in prediction of future price compared with qualitative methods (Delphi model) is slightly different. It indicates the importance of using qualitative methods beside quantitative methods for forecasting economic variables.