Economists shunning hunches and hearsay have put their mathematical models to work in picking the likely World Cup winner, a news report said on Sunday.
The money men at UBS, ABN Amro and Goldman Sachs banks in Singapore resorted to the statistical tools of finance.
According to UBS, Italy will lift the cup on July 9, while ABN Amro and Goldman Sachs named Brazil the likely victor, according to the forecasts in The Sunday Times.
The UBS economist took a model developed in the 1960s to predict whether a country would be in a recession or boom phase and adapted it for the world's biggest football tournament.
"The model is used to predict the probability of an event happening and that is what we are trying to do with the World Cup," Andreas Hofert was quoted as saying.
He looked at data such as the team's world ranking, its track record in the competition and how many of the top 120 players are in its squad.
After running the formula sequentially through all the games in the draw, Hofert came up with an Italy-Brazil final and Italy the winner.
ABN Amro's economists looked at similar data, but their model produced a different result, with Brazil beating France in the final and Italy knocked out by France in the quarter-finals.
The economists at Goldman Sachs said Brazil came up tops with a 12.4 per cent chance of winning.
So far, UBS and ABN Amro consider their calculations quite reliable, but even the economists said their predictions are not always right.
"I wouldn't bet on them," Hofert told the newspaper.
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