Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 2/2015

The paper concerns offi cial statistics, particularly as produced by the NSIs. Their contribution to the society is considered well captured by the concept of public value. Official statistics create value for the democracy as foundation for evidence-based politics. Democracies and autocracies alike need statistics to govern the public. Unique for the democracy is the need of statistics to govern the governors, for which the independence of the NSI is crucial. Three ways of creating public value are the value chain, the value shop and the value network. The chain is appropriate for the production, the shop for the interpretation and the network for the dissemination of statistics. Automation reduces the need to rely on the value chain as core business model. Thereto automation increases the statistical output, which in turn increases the need of shop and network activities. Replacing the chain with the shop as core model will elevate the NSIs from commodity producers to a processing industry.

Keywords
Public value, value creation, public interest, professional independence, offi cial statistics, national statistical institutes

The ongoing debate about the necessity of harmonized accruals-based public accounting standards and the possible implementation of an integrated reporting covering public accounts and government finance statistics (GFS) reporting, have widened the potential scope for comparative research on consolidation practices in Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and National accounts, notably in the European Union. This development would probably add momentum to broaden the scope of reporting to WGA.
The article analyses in depth the conceptual frameworks behind financial reporting and national accounts, to better understand the diff erences between the definition of public sector and its boundary in national accounts as compared with financial reporting. This would form a useful input to the overall research agenda on WGA.

Keywords
National accounts, GFS, IPSAS, general government sector, public sector, WGA

The article focuses on the patterns of the individual position in the labour market according to various socioeconomic groups using draft classification of European Socio-economic Groups (ESeG). The position is primarily measured by a specially developed indicator on the Risk of Unemployment based on data of the Labour Force Survey. Secondly, the data of Structure of Earnings Survey is used for calculation of earnings levels. The results have proven that discrepancies among various ESeG groups are considerable and justify the use of the classification for analyses in the field of social position and labour market.

Keywords
Socio-economic groups, classification ESeG, social status, risk of unemployment, earnings, Labour Force Survey, Structure of Earnings Statistics

Composite indices are increasingly recognized as a useful tool to measure socio-economic phenomena such as quality of life, competitiveness, development, and poverty. Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to the methodological issues associated with composite index construction, particularly non-compensability and comparability of the data over time. In this paper, we compare two non-compensatory composite indices for measuring multidimensional phenomena and monitoring their changes over time: the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto Index (AMPI) and the Mean-Min Function (MMF). The AMPI is a non-linear composite index that rewards the units with balanced values of the individual indicators. The MMF is a two-parameter function that allows compensability among dimensions with a cost that increases with unbalance and can be seen as an intermediate case between a compensatory and a full non-compensatory index. An application to a set of individual indicators of development in the Italian regions is also presented.

Keywords
Composite index, compensability, normalization, aggregation, ranking

Benford's Law (sometimes also called Benford's Distribution or Benford's Test) is one of the possible tools for verification of a data structure in a given file regarding the relative frequencies of occurrence of the fi rst (or second, etc.) digit from the left. If it is used as a goodness-of-fi t test on sample data, there are usually no problems with its interpretation. However, certain factual questions arise in connection with validity of Benford's Law in large data sets in governmental statistics; such questions should be resolved before the law is used. In this paper we discuss the application potential of Benford's Law when working with extensive data sets in the areas of economic and social statistics.

Keywords
Benford's Law, goodness-of-fit test, Z-test, national accounts

HENDL, J. et al. Statistika v aplikacích (Statistics in Applications). 1^st ed. Prague: Portál, 2014. ISBN 978-80-262-0700-9.

Agricultural statistics have the longest and richest past in the history of the independent Hungarian statistical service. During the 150 years history of Hungarian statistics agricultural statistics have always been in the forefront of developments and their implementation. The developments that were realized through the years concerned equally the functioning of the system of agricultural statistics, the methods used, the technical solutions applied, but they also brought numerous novelties in the communication of agricultural data. It is maybe not a lack of modesty to mention that in the majority of cases, developments in the field of agricultural statistics have infl uenced the whole Hungarian statistical system. It does not happen frequently either that thanks to statistics, new concepts are introduced in agricultural terminology, statistical data influence the development of agricultural policy. It is not easy and would maybe be unworthy to qualify or rank the developments presented in this article. Nevertheless I would like to highlight among them – due to their novelty and specifi cities – two major developments, the elaboration and use of spot maps, and the setting up and introduction of the unified (electronic) data processing system. I hope however that the solution we used to publish quickly preliminary census data, the database of the plantation survey using geo-coordinates, or the agricultural atlas and interactive graphs used in agricultural statistics will also arouse the interest of the reader.

Keywords
Agricultural censuses, spot-map, unified data processing system, communication tools