Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 1/2018

Purchasing Power Parity is the corner stone of all international comparisons. Various approaches to Purchasing Power Parity, such as the Big Mac Index, KFC Index, iPad Index, Tall Latte Index or Ikea Index were popularized to the broader audience besides the OECD Purchasing Power Parity indices. The aim of this paper is to develop a new ready-to-use quick and simple index based on the prices of Nespresso coffee’s capsules and show the main challenges of such indices as well as of the PPP concept. For the purpose of our research the data on the Nespresso capsules prices were collected. Taking into account also the popularity (demand side) of the capsules types, the Espresso line was chosen as the basis for which all further calculations are made. The Nespresso Index provides us with clear evidence that the Law of One Price cannot work in recent world because of three key features. Firstly, differences in taxes make the perfect parity impossible. Secondly, the price discrimination prevents the rational subjects from arbitrage. Finally, the changes in the exchange rate make such indices highly volatile. Despite these weaknesses, the Nespresso Index could be used as the useful supplement of the OECD PPP as it is low cost, easy and fast to compute and digestible for the lay public.

Keywords
Price index, purchasing power parity, Big Mac Index, Nespresso Index

Exclusion from the labour market is a serious social problem that is also addressed by the Europe 2020 strategy. While in the past the attention of statisticians and sociologists in the fight against poverty and social exclusion has concentrated mainly on income poverty and material deprivation, in recent times many studies and analyses are much more focused on work intensity as well. Households that use their work potential to less than 20%, have a very low work intensity, and members of such households are included into the population of people who are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Moreover, the low use of labour potential of households significantly increases the risk of income poverty and the threat of material deprivation. This article provides an analysis of work intensity levels of Slovak households depending on the factors that are monitored by the EU-SILC 2015. The impact of relevant factors is quantified by correspondence analysis and by multinomial logistic regression model.

Keywords
Work intensity, poverty and social exclusion, EU-SILC − European Union statistics on income and living condition, correspondence analysis, multinomial logistic regression

Time series with long seasonal periods are very common. Several methods have been proposed for modeling of long seasonal cycles, the most commonly used ones being those based on basis expansion. In this paper, we present and discuss these methods. We also use them to model seasonality in realized volatility of several major stock market indices and find evidence for the existence of yearly as well as weekly seasonality. The presented approaches can potentially be used for modeling of any seasonal time series with a long seasonal period.

Keywords
Time series, seasonality, basis expansion, volatility

The article is devoted to assessment of the development level of the Central Federal district, based on the study of gross domestic product by region by Russian Classification of Economic Activities grouped by institutional sector of the economy. We apply the author's methodological toolkit that includes the formation of individual and integrated indicators of the functioning of complex systems, considered as socio-ecological and economic systems. The algorithm of constructing indicators is based on aggregate data and econometric modeling and takes into account both individual assessment indicators and specific conditions for these systems functioning (factors of condition and impact). We present the methodology of forming the harmonic coefficient characterizing the equilibrium of socio-ecological and economic systems economic development by activities, the latter is one of the criteria of complex systems stability. This approach was tested on the example of Central Federal district regions using Russian Federation Federal State Statistics Service data for 2007–2015.

Keywords
Regional economy, socio-ecological and economic systems, econometric modeling, integral indicators, balance

This paper aims to determinte whether or not certain questionnaire designs could lead to higher response rates compared to other questionnaire designs. To this end, the data from conducted business web survey on a sample of Croatian enterprises was used. In the survey nine different questionnaire designs were randomly distributed across the sample of enterprises. The difference between the questionnaire designs can be found in the number of questions that have been shown to respondents per questionnaire screen and in the kind of provided pictures. The conducted analyses have shown that, when all enterprises together are observed, questionnaire designs in which all questions were shown immediately to the respondents with “negative” pictures included and where questionnaire is divided into logical groups of questions with “positive” pictures, the highest response rates in the future business web surveys could be achieved. Thereby, the recommendation of questionnaire designs for enterprises stratified according to their size, legal form, main activity and location of their headquarters are also provided.

Keywords
Business web survey, Croatian enterprises, log-linear model, Pearson’s chi-square test, response rate, questionnaire design

ŘEZANKOVÁ, H. Analýza dat z dotazníkových šetření (Analysis of Data from Questionnaire Surveys). 4^th Ed. Prague: Professional Publishing, 2017, 225 p. ISBN 978-80-906594-8-3.