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The particularly wide range of applications of small area prediction, e.g. in policy making decisions, has meant that this topic has received substantial attention in recent years. The problems of estimating mean-squared predictive error, of correcting that estimator for bias and of constructing prediction intervals have been addressed by various workers, although existing methodology is still restricted to a narrow range of models. To overcome this difficulty we develop new, bootstrap-based methods, which are applicable in very general settings, for constructing bias-corrected estimators of mean-squared error and for computing prediction regions. Unlike existing techniques, which are based largely on Taylor expansions, our bias-corrected mean-squared error estimators do not require analytical calculation. They also have the property that they are non-negative. Our prediction intervals have a high degree of …