This paper will review two recent software packages; PcGive Professional (Version 8) and Eviews (Version 1.1A). PcGive Professional is an interactive, menu-driven econometric package for time series analysis. It consists of two separate modules: PcGive (for singleequation estimation) and PcFiml (for system equation modelling and estimation). ' This version is the next stage in an evolution of these two modules, written by Jiirgen Doornik and David Hendry. Henceforth, we will refer to this combination as 'PcGive/PcFiml'.' Eviews (short for econometric views) is a product of Quantitative Micro software and is the Windows environment successor to the software package ' M ~C ~O T S P ' . ~
No review of a program can be complete without a comparison of its relative strengths and weaknesses with respect to its competitors. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of PcGive Professional and to compare its features to those of E ~i e w s . ~ As PcGive/PcFiml is a product of the Hendry econometric methodology, it is limited in some aspects relative to Eviews, which tends to be more general in nature. However, Eviews is also limited in that there are a number of time series procedures available in PcGive/PcFiml that are not available in Eviews. Thus, not ' GIVE stands for General Instrumental Variable Estimation and FIML stands for Full Information Maximum Likelihood Estimation.
Reviews of versions 5.0,6.0, and 7.0 can be found in Terasvirta (1988). Ericsson and Lyss (1991), Podivinisky (1990), andPsaradakis (1993) respectively. Escribano (1995) provided a description of the main features of PcGive Professional (version 8) and of changes over previous versions. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review from a dimerent perspective as well as a comparison with Eviews.