Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 1/2019

Margins on buying and selling transactions, or simply “financial” margins, form one part of the complex system of national accounts. These financial services in acquiring and disposing of financial assets and liabilities on financial markets constitute an important role in output of financial institutions. Up to now, the Czech Statistical Office recorded only small part of these margins in national accounts, but in the next revision which is to be published in June 2020 the system should include all types in the whole time series 1993–2019.

The aim of this paper is to develop the missing methodology of capturing margins and demonstrate all difficulties connected with their estimation.

Our approach is influenced by the fact that in the Czech Republic no suitable database with detailed information about transactions is available. That is why simplifications and assumptions needed to be formulated. The paper contains time series of cross-border margins and domestic margins on transactions with securities, shares, investment fund shares and foreign currencies.

 

The importance of working with sufficiently robust methods has been rising in recent years. This growth is related to the extensive usage of highly frequent data, which we currently encounter in many fields including finance. Since with an increasing number of observations, the probability of outlier presence also rises. Moreover, as it is known, standard methods are not able to work correctly with outliers and, consequently, standard estimates are often biased. We focus on estimators of autocorrelation function for univariate time series, for which we propose a method based on clipping an original time series and working with a binary time series instead. The clipping helps to deal with outliers and the estimation is not affected as much as with standard methods. We also derive an asymptotical distribution of the estimator, what gives our method a major advantage in comparison with other robust methods, which are often presented without this. Furthermore, knowing the distribution of the estimator allows us to perform statistical inference.

 

ACF, robust estimation, clipping, confidence interval, time series

 

 

We have collected a large dataset – more than 21 000 websites – through web-crawling the public resources of the Czech Internet. The proposed method for website hosting detection along with their geographic location and software were applied on the collected data to extend basic statistical information about the Czech websites published by the national domain registrar CZ.NIC. For analysis, we divided the data into nine categories to show differences between them, for example, between the public and private sector. The procedures used in this paper may also be applied for an extended analysis of websites in other countries, for example, for verification of fulfillment of legal directives to be implemented by public sector.

 

Internet, web content, hosting, geographical location, Czech Republic, CZ.NIC

 

 

Knowing whether data are reliable is of fundamental importance to the establishment of knowledge, the formulation of explanatory hypotheses, and the development of effective policy. Yet there appear to be no standard, established tests to enable users to judge whether they should accept a given statistic as a fact. Numerous internationally agreed documents set out principles and practices to promote sound statistics, but they offer no direct guidance on whether to accept data as presented. Other documents discuss statistical quality, but focus largely on utilitarian considerations such as availability and timeliness; when they do discuss accuracy, they again consider processes (lists of good practices) rather than results (are the data correct?).

This paper is a plea for, and a first attempt at, identifying some characteristics of data that may be accepted as true.

 

Statistical quality, accuracy, reliability, knowledge, truth

 

 

The Internet and digitalization are fundamentally changing the way people, businesses and governments interact. This has led to a new phase of globalization underpinned by the movement of data across national borders, changing the nature, patterns and actors in international trade in goods and services.

However, despite the growing importance of what is commonly referred to as digital trade, little empirical and internationally comparable information currently exists, inhibiting a full understanding of the scale and policy challenges of digital Trade, which has in turn raised concerns about the capacity of current statistics to fully capture and separate identify this phenomenon. In the other words, in digital trade economy there is a remarkable gaps and many of its statistics are not enough to fulfill the demands. It has been growing in importance, and with it, demands for detailed statistics from a number of policy areas including market access, trade facilitation, opportunities for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), regulation, competition, digital data flows and privacy has remained yet.

Providing an overall review and making practical examples in case of Iran, this study tries to open other insight toward digital trade statistics as a new product of economic statistics. Beside, in this study some of the challenges like informal or semi-informal sectors toward digital trade will be addressed and an analysis on Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conceptual framework and an inventory of current measurement practices on digital trade will be presented. Finally, a case study on economic account new digital trade activity and startup based on the internet platform in Iran will be illustrated to describe the exponential growth rate of these kind of e-commerce in Iran. Producing reliable and accurate official statistics in this case is highly desirable. On the whole, obtained result show that e-commerce has been placed in top up-warding sector of economic growth in recent years in Iran.

 

Internet, digitalization, globalization, e-commerce, digital trade, informal or semi-informal economy

 

 

Globalisation presents significant statistical challenges, particularly for small and open economies in terms of measuring statistical indicators and communicating the results to users. The European Statistical System allocated high priority to the better measuring of globalisation in the statistical processes and output, in business or macro-economic statistics.

Some concrete actions were already undertaken such as setting up of the EuroGroups Register of multinational enterprise groups and the putting in place of a so-called Early-warning System for monitoring restructurings of the groups.

This paper focuses on the EuroGroups Register (EGR), the central statistical business register of Eurostat and the EU and EFTA countries' statistical authorities. The EGR is part of the EU statistical infrastructure and has been built up to better capture globalisation effects as well as for improving the consistency of national data on enterprise groups.

 

Globalisation, EGR, statistical business register, multinational enterprise groups

 

 

In the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy, official statistics were controlled by the Vienna central authorities (the Central Statistical Commission, Ministry of Commerce and other ministries) and statistical offices of local authorities in the individual countries (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and others), whose competences were very limited. Insufficient cooperation and coordination of activities of these statistical offices had been subject to criticism as well as the lack of general reporting obligations.

The Czechoslovakian Act regulating the state statistics approved by the Revolutionary National Assembly, three months after the establishment of a new state centralized statistical service to the Statistical State Council as a Deputy Authority and the State Statistical Office as an executive body, and also enacted general reporting obligations and guarantees of consistent protection of individual data. The current statute of the state statistical service in the Czech Republic is actually based on the same principles as the Act approved a century ago. The paper describes the emergence of Act No. 49/1919 and a long and complicated path leading to its fulfilment. The protracted problem was also the post of the chairman of both statistical authorities and the provision of a suitable object for activity of the State Statistical Office.

 

Statistical State Council, State Statistical Office, Dobroslav Krejčí, Karel Engliš, František Weyr

 

 

The article focuses on comparison of contents of statistical handbooks published by the Czechoslovak State Statistical Office in the years 1920 and 1925 with that of statistical yearbooks of Czechoslovakia’s successor states – Statistical Yearbook of the Czech Republic 2017 and Statistical Yearbook of the Slovak Republic 2017.

 

Statistical handbook, statistical yearbook, Czech Statistical Office, Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic

 

 

One of the main purposes of the Statistics Department of Banco de Portugal is to ensure a statistical production with high quality standards aiming at fully meeting users’ needs, aligned with the best practices and procedures recommended by the international organizations. Following its commitment to quality, one of the Bank’s priorities is to develop a wide set of quality control procedures that ensure high levels of regular and thorough review of the key statistical outputs.

Statistical quality control is based on different procedures and working arrangements that make sure that processes are effective and efficient and the risks are mitigated. In order to achieve higher quality statistics, there are several quality indicators performed by the primary statistics’ compilers. 

This paper will present the main quality indicators used and the ongoing process to improve the model of regular and systematic quality controls.

 

Statistical quality control, quality assessment, quality indicators

 

 

During the last several years the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (SORS) made significant efforts in order to introduce quality management system. Information and knowledge about different quality issues are continuously being spread through the intranet portal on quality. User and staff satisfaction surveys have already being implemented for a number of years. Documentation system for quality management, based on ISO 9001 standard, has been introduced, as well as system for producing reference metadata and quality reports (RZSMETA). Standardization of the production process started in the SORS many years ago, in connection with introduction of Integrated Survey Technology (IST). Completely designed and developed in the SORS, IST has become regionally recognized data integration concept supporting several phases of statistical production process (build, collect, process and analyse). It is a challenge now how to efficiently

use these comparative advantages in order to build general metadata system as a precondition for further improvement of statistical process and product quality.

 

Quality management, metadata, standardization, IST