Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 2/2014

In the last 20 years statistical data has become vastly more important for economic policy in Europe. Whereas economic statistics once played a role in relatively marginal areas of European policy, the establishment of the macroeconomic convergence criteria for joining Economic and Monetary Union in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992–1993 sparked a quantum leap. Questions of comparability and harmonisation suddenly became increasingly relevant. The Stability and Growth Pact then made the calculation of the budget deficit and government debt even more important, including the measurement of GDP as denominator for the respektive ratios. With the outbreak of the second Greek crisis in 2009–10 and the fl aws that emerged in the quality of Greek economic statistics, statistical questions were suddenly at the centre of international media and political interest. At the same time the fi nancial and economic crisis brought to the fore severe economic imbalances, both between European countries and within European countries. In order to prevent similar imbalances in the future, the EU has developed and adopted the "macroeconomic imbalance procedure", in which currently eleven macroeconomic indicators are used for on-going surveillance of countries ("alert mechanism"). Thus more economic statistics have gained an important political function, particularly since sanctions can even be imposed on the basis of them. In parallel with this, the new European Supervisory Authorities use "dashboards" i.e. a range of statistics that are regularly watched and are intended to function as early warning indicators. The paper takes a look at this move towards more "evidence-based policy making" and its implications for European statistics and statisticians and discusses the related challenges, paying particular attention to the role of the European Central Bank and its specifi c data needs.

Keywords
Statistics, policy-making, European Central Bank, European System of Central Banks, Eurostat

This paper evaluates the accuracy of macroeconomic economic forecasts of the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic using the average forecasting error, the mean absolute error and Theil’s inequality coeffi cient. The paper analyses the forecast accuracy of the main macroeconomic indicators – real GDP growth, nominal GDP growth, GDP defl ator growth, real private consumption growth, average infl ation rate, average unemployment rate and current account balance to GDP Ratio. The forecast accuracy is also assessed using the modifi ed Diebold and Mariano test, which compares the accuracy of two forecasts under the null hypothesis that assumes no diff erences in accuracy. Last but not least, the paper compares the accuracy of the forecasts of the Ministry of Finance to those of the European Commission, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and International Monetary Fund.

Keywords
The accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts, the average forecasting error, the mean absolute error, Theil’s inequality coefficient, the naďve forecast, modified Diebold-Mariano test

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) represents the basic indicator of macroeconomic performance of the Czech economy and its importance is growing. The need to get the information on its development as quickly as possible for the necessary government acts is unquestionable. Nevertheless, the time taken to publish its first quarterly estimate of growth rate is signifi cantly longer (45 days after the reference quarter) in comparison to some other countries such as the USA and the United Kingdom.
The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between composite leading indicator (CLI), composite koincidence indicator (CCI) and the development of GDP followed by verifi cation of a predictive ability of these composite indicators. The relationships between GDP and indicators available in this 30-day period which could enter to this CLI and CCI are analysed by the advanced methods of time series analysis.

Keywords
Gross Domestic Product, composite indicator, business tendency surveys, co-integration analysis

The stochastic approach is a specific way of viewing index numbers, in which uncertainty and statistical properties play a central role. This approach, applied to the prices, treats the underlying rate of infl ation as an unknown parameter that has to be estimated from the individual prices. Thus, the stochastic approach provils the whole probability distribution of inflation. In this paper we present and discuss several basic stochastic index numbers. We propose a simple stochastic model, which leads to a price index formula being a mixture of the previously presented specifi cations. We verify the considered indices on a real data set.

Keywords
Price indices, stochastic index numbers, price index theory

Kakwani and Lambert state the three axioms, which should be respected by an equitable tax system. They also proposed a measurement system to evaluate the violations of the axioms. One of the axioms, axiom 2, formulates the progression principle in income tax systems. Vernizzi and Pellegrino improved the alternative index to evaluate violations concerning the progressive command in a tax system. The main aim of this paper is to compare the two indexes in order to evaluate violations of progressive principle in income tax systém using the real data. We also check how the progressivity of taxes and skewness of income distribution affect the measurement of the progressive principle violation.

Keywords
Personal income tax, progressive principle, redistributive effect, progressive of taxes, equitable tax system

The GERD is one of Europe 2020 headline indicators being tracked within the Europe 2020 strategy. The headline indicator is the 3% target for the GERD to be reached within the EU by 2020. Eurostat defi nes “GERD” as total gross domestic expenditure on research and experimental development in a percentage of GDP. GERD depends on numerous factors of a general economic background, namely of employment, innovation and research, science and technology. The values of these indicators vary among the European countries, and consequently the occurrence of outliers can be anticipated in corresponding analyses. In such a case, a classical statistical approach – the least squares method – can be highly unreliable, the robust regression methods representing an acceptable and useful tool. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate the advantages of robust regression and applicability of the bootstrap approach in regression based on both classical and robust methods.

Keywords
LTS regression, MM regression, outliers, leverage points, bootstrap, GERD

Moments and cumulants are commonly used to characterize the probability distribution or observed data set. The use of the moment method of parameter estimation is also common in the construction of an appropriate parametric distribution for a certain data set. The moment method does not always produce satisfactory results. It is difficult to determine exactly what information concerning the shape of the distribution is expressed by its moments of the third and higher order. In the case of small samples in particular, numerical values of sample moments can be very different from the corresponding values of theoretical moments of the relevant probability distribution from which the random sample comes. Parameter estimations of the probability distribution made by the moment method are oft en considerably less accurate than those obtained using other methods, particularly in the case of small samples. The present paper deals with an alternative approach to the construction of an appropriate parametric distribution for the considered data set using order statistics.

Keywords
Mikrocensus, L-moments and TL-moments of probability distribution, sample L-moments and TL-moments, probability density function, distribution function, quantile function, order statistics, income distribution