AbstractThis paper describes procedures for forecasting countries' output growth rates and medians of a set of output growth rates using Hierarchical Bayesian (HB) models. The purpose of this paper is to show how the γ‐shrinkage forecast of Zellner and Hong (1989) emerges from a hierarchical Bayesian model and to describe how the Gibbs sampler can be used to fit this model to yield possibly improved output growth rate and median output growth rate forecasts. The procedures described in this paper offer two primary methodological contributions to previous work on this topic: (1) the weights associated with widely‐used shrinkage forecasts are determined endogenously, and (2) the posterior predictive density of the future median output growth rate is obtained numerically from which optimal point and interval forecasts are calculated. Using IMF data, we find that the HB median output growth rate forecasts outperform forecasts obtained from variety of benchmark models. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.