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- What Can Be Learned on the Living Standard of Households from National Accounts?Stanislava Hronová, Richard Hindls, Luboš MarekThe living standard of households can be assessed with the aid of several indices. The standards of the System of National Accounts (SNA 1993 and ESA 1995) have introduced the concept of actual final consumption and social transfers in kind apart from the final consumption expenditure. However, the information which could be taken from these indices is utilized only to a very small extent. So, what can they actually tell us? Can they be used for assessing the living standards of households and their comparing on an international scale? The paper gives answers to these questions by means of comparing the data from the Czech Republic and France.
KeywordsActual final consumption, social transfers in kind, households, disposable income, living standard
- Can the Business Tendency Survey Predict the Economic Indicators in Czechia?Veronika Ptáčková, Jakub Fischer
In uncertain times, it is crucial to have some statistics, which can help with the prediction of future development in the national economy. Business Tendency Survey is one of the most essential and favourite tools for predictions in economic statistics. The article aims to determine which confidence indicators help predict the Czech economic development and which base of the confidence indicators is the best for making predictions. Using the Granger causality test, we prove the Business Tendency Survey indicators are beneficial for predictions. The economic sentiment indicator and the confidence indicator for industry predict the gross value added better than the gross domestic product. The long-term average is a slightly better base than the base indices. The predictions are most accurate in the horizon of two quarters. Individual composite indicator for the industry well predicts both the industrial production index (for the next month) and the gross value added in the industry (for the next quarter).
KeywordsBusiness Tendency Survey, prediction ability, gross domestic product, business cycle, base indices
- The aim of this study is to examine the impact of migration on migrant-sending communities. The particular attention is drawn to the well-being of households residing in Central Asia, where migration is a crucial issue due to constant and high outflow of labor force. More specifically, in an attempt to determine the extent to which international migration influences subjective well-being of household members left behind, the research uses panel data collected in Tajikistan from 2007 to 2011. The results indicate that, on average, there is a positive relationship between migration of a family member and improvements in satisfaction with life as-a-whole and current financial situation of those who are staying behind. The positive effects are even more pronounced when the sample is restricted to migrant-sending households that receive remittances. The further split-sample analysis also documents that the impact of migration appears to be heterogeneous across different economic and geographic contexts.KeywordsInternational migration, remittances, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, financial satisfaction
- Modeling of reliability of the complex systems (machines, large networks, human body) is an important area of recent research. There are two main approaches applied: i) fault trees, ii) Petri nets. For the probabilistic study of a system is vital to know its minimal cut/minimal path sets. Both for fault trees and Petri Nets it is an NP-hard problem. Liu and Chiou (1997) described the equivalence of both representations for a given system. Furthermore, they found a top-down matrix algorithm to find critical cuts and minimal paths of the Petri net of the system. They claim without proof that their algorithm is more efficient than the ones for fault trees. We present both representations of a system. The algorithm is illustrated on a simple example of a three-masted vessel and a more complex “three-motor” system by Vesely et al. (1981).KeywordsReliability, time to failure, fault tree, stochastic Petri net, exponential distribution
- Using the Decision Trees to Improve Variable Selection for Building Composite IndicatorsAdrian Oțoiu, Emilia ȚițanThe established variable selection methods for building composite indicators have strong limitations with respect to the results obtained. Some of them focus on getting an index structure with a high alpha reliability and/or a high percentage of the total data variance explained. These methods are likely to omit variables with strong explanatory power, and lead to an unsatisfactory classification of countries. Decision trees can also be used in selecting variables that are the most relevant for building composite indicators. An example of variable selection for building a composite indicator, which compares results using Cronbach's coefficient alpha, factor analysis, and decision trees, shows that the latter method yields comparable, or better results. Using cluster analysis on the selected variables, we show that the decision tree variable shortlist has better discrimination power than those obtained with the other methods, even in the presence of outliers and missing values.KeywordsComposite indicators, decision trees, Cronbach’s Alpha, factor analysis, indicator methodology, entrepreneurship indicators
- Bank Specific, Industry Specific and Macroeconomic Determinants of Bank Efficiency in Euro AreaEhsan Rajabi, Reza Sherafatian-JahromiThis study analyses the cost and profit efficiency of the banking sector in all 17-Euro area Member States during the period from 1999 until 2012. The two-stage approach, the generalized method of moment (GMM) regression model is used to regress the efficiency level obtained from the first stage on factors that could influence the efficiency score. Therefore, the efficiency score measures that derived from the DEA estimations are used as the dependent variable and then regressed upon environmental variables. The result suggests that the cost and profit efficiency of 126 listed bank is found to be on average negatively related to population density, banking activity, loan management activity, and profitability while economic condition, financial deeping rate, and bank network extension have a positive influence on cost and profit efficiency. Overall, our results demonstrate that environmental variables contribute significantly to the difference in efficiency scores between the Member States.
KeywordsEfficiency, Euro area, generalized method of moment (GMM), environmental variables, banking characteristics
- Modeling of Development Trends in Sales of New Passenger Vehicles in Poland Using the ARIMA-X-12 and TRAMO-SEATS MethodsWojciech Lewicki, Aleksandra A. Olejarz-Wahba
The purpose of this article is to present development trends in sales of new passenger vehicles in Poland. The authors of the article suggest that this way of presenting sales results is incorrect. When decomposing the time series of the number of passenger car sales per seasonal component, the trend and accidental fluctuations and irregular fluctuations, it was proved that the analyzed phenomenon is more complex. In addition, it has been proved that the sale of new cars is a component of sales of passenger cars produced this year and sales of vehicles produced in the previous year, in which sales are characterized by different seasonality.
The monthly data from January 2013 to November 2018 were used to decompose the time series of sales of new passenger vehicles in Poland. The data from the Central Register of Vehicles and Drivers was made available. The ARIMA-X-12 and TRAMO-SEATS methods were used to decompose the analyzed time series.Keywords
Time series, seasonality, vehicle sales, trend, TRAMO-SEATS, ARIMA-X-12, outliers