Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 2/2018

Article develop the cyclical adjustment methodology of the balance of goods and services, which is beneficial especially for a small open economy. Cyclical adjustment procedure is applied and adjusted to the Czech data by quantifying cyclical determinants of foreign trade such as domestic and foreign output gap and trade prices deviations from the trend. Results show that cyclical adjustment of external trade balance provide a useful tool for assessing the sustainability of trade development and thus help to better analyze current situation and forecast short-term future development.

Keywords
Business cycle, cyclical adjustment, external balance of trade

Composite leading indicators (CLIs) are recognized as eligible tools for business cycle analysis. When the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructs CLI, its composition depends on national data only. However, European economies are often small and open and therefore their business cycles relate to situations in other countries. The approach described in this paper reflects these characteristics. The international CLIs for Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia are constructed and the leading influences on these countries are discussed.
The methodology of the CLI construction is described in detail by several organizations. It, therefore, comes as a surprise, that there are no publicly available software programs, R packages or Python libraries, that would support the whole computational process or its automation. A new Python-based framework is proposed to fill this gap and it is demonstrated on the international CLI construction. It is introduced for the very first time in this paper and it enables users to quickly analyze and visualize larger volumes of data than any other available solution.

Keywords
Business cycle analysis, leading indicators, automation

This paper investigates the risk substance of newly established business in the Czech Republic. As traditional methods for risk measurement in this case come across the lack of reliable data from capital markets, lack of any financial history for start-up companies and low level of diversification of investors, we draw on the theory of business risk and empirically investigate the role that risk fundamentals may play in the overall riskiness of start-up firms in the Czech Republic. Our findings confirm that the return fluctuations of start-up companies are statistically significantly associated with the operating and financial leverage.

Keywords
Risk measurement, start-up business, degree of operating leverage, degree of financial leverage

A number of processes to which statistical control is applied are subject to various effects that cause random changes in the mean value. The removal of these fluctuations is either technologically impossible or economically disadvantageous under current conditions. The frequent occurrence of signals in the Shewhart chart due to these fluctuations is then undesirable and therefore the conventional control limits need to be extended. Several approaches to the design of the control charts with extended limits are presented in the paper and applied on the data from a real production process. The methods assume samples of size greater than 1. The performance of the charts is examined using the operating characteristic and average run length. The study reveals that in many cases, reducing the risk of false alarms is insufficient.

Keywords
Statistical process control, modified chart, acceptance chart, variance component chart, average run length

This paper refers to the rectifying sampling inspection plans with given lot tolerance percent defective (denoted LTPD). The LTPD sampling plans minimizing mean inspection cost per lot of process average quality, when the remainder of rejected lots is inspected, were originally designed by Dodge and Romig for inspection by attributes (each inspected item is classified as either good or defective). The corresponding rectifying plans for inspection by variables were created by author of this paper. Comparison of these two types of the LTPD plans from economical point of view is presented herein. Using the LTPD plans by variables we can reach fundamental savings of the inspection cost. In this paper we analysed the situations in which the rectifying LTPD plans by variables are more economical than the corresponding attribute sampling plans. A criterion for deciding if inspection by variables is to be used instead of inspection by attributes is suggested and calculated for input parameters of acceptance sampling.

Keywords
Acceptance sampling, rectifying LTPD plans, inspection by variables, single quality characteristic, one specification limit

Understanding the dynamics of the daily number of fatal road traffic accidents is important for local authorities, police departments, healthcare facilities and insurance companies, enabling them to design preventive measures, provide appropriate emergency service and care and reliably estimate traffic accident insurance costs. In the present study, using the Fatality Analysis Reporting System provided by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, we construct a daily time series of the number of accidents for each state of the United States. We model the trend as well as yearly and weekly seasonality present in the time series and provide respective trend and seasonality statistics. Differences in accident rates and yearly seasonality between states were detected, clustering analysis being applied to identify clusters of states with similar yearly seasonality, weekly seasonal patterns for different states proving to be about the same.

Keywords
Road traffic accidents, yearly seasonality, long seasonal period, generalized linear model, model selection, cluster analysis

In the Habsburg monarchy demographic and economic statistics was concentrated mainly in Vienna offices. The agricultural statistics was the only one that was consequently developed in Bohemia (already from year 1770) by Patriotic-Economic Society, that in the years 1856–1858 created its own miniature statistical office. That became after long negotiations the base of the Land Statistical Office that started its operation 120 years ago (year 1898). The Czechoslovak State Statistical Office like today’s Czech Statistical Office are its direct followers. Founders of statistical service in Bohemia were Karel Kořistka and Dobroslav Krejčí. Similar statistical office was set up in Moravia in the year 1899. A remarkable achievement here was an approval of the Land Act, which sets the reporting obligation for land statistics actions.

Keywords
History of statistics, Patriotic-Economic Society, Land Statistical Office, Karel Kořistka, Dobroslav Krejčí