Statistika: Statistics and Economy Journal - No. 4/2015

Income distribution strongly affects the value of risk-of poverty, what could explain small values of poverty rate in the Czech Republic. Therefore it is important to examine the level of income inequality in society and find out the socio-economic characteristics of people affecting the overall income inequality. The factor showing the biggest influence on the income level is education, so it is meaningful to examine the relationship between income inequality and poverty rate of each group of people by their highest attained education. One appropriate approach is quantification of each group’s contribution to the overall income differentiation by decomposition of some income inequality indicators. This decomposition enables also to identify the reason the value of each contribution according to various aspects, such as the group size or total volume of groups incomes. The development of overall income inequality in the last year is a necessary condition for the prediction in the future, so the trends of time series of some inequality indicators were analyzed. The whole analysis enables to complete a view on income level and its inequality in the society, which are important indicators measuring the living standards of people.

Keywords
Income inequality, poverty rate, highest attained education, Theil index

At the Rio “Earth Summit” the Convention on Biological Diversity introduced a global commitment to conservation of biological diversity and sustainable use of its components. An implementation process is going on, based on a strategic plan, biodiversity targets and a strategy for mobilizing financial resources. According to target “2”, by 2020 national accounts should include monetary aggregates related to biodiversity. Environmental accounts can play an important role – together with other information – in monitoring processes connected with target “20”: contribute to identifying activities needed to preserve biodiversity, calculating the associated costs and eventually assessing funding needs. In particular, EPEA and ReMEA are valuable accounting tools for providing data on biodiversity expenditure. The high quality of the information provided by these accounts makes them good candidates for being adopted world-wide within the Convention’s monitoring processes. Enhanced interaction between statisticians and officials from ministries of environment would be crucial to reach significant advancement towards standardization of the information used in support of the Convention.

Keywords
Conservation of biological diversity, Aichi Biodiversity Targets, environmental-economic accounts, environmental expenditure, standardization

In the present paper, we propose a wavelet-based hypothesis test for second-order stationarity in a Gaussian time series without any deterministic components or seasonality. The null hypothesis is that of a second-order stationary process, the alternative hypothesis being that of a non-stationary process with a time-varying autocovariance function (excluding processes with unit roots). The test is based on the smoothing of the series of squared maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform coefficients employing modern techniques, such as robust filtering and cross-validation. We propose several test statistics and use bootstrap to obtain their distributions under the null hypothesis. We examine the test in settings that may mimic the properties of economic time series, showing that it enjoys reasonable size and power characteristics. The test is also applied to a data set of the U.S. gross domestic product to demonstrate its practical usefulness in an economic time series analysis.

Keywords
Wavelets, time series, non-stationarity, bootstrap, hypothesis test, gross domestic product

The subject of the paper is segmented linear, quadratic, and cubic regression based on B-spline basis functions. In this article we expose the formulas for the computation of B-splines of order one, two, and three that is needed to construct linear, quadratic, and cubic regression. We list some interesting properties of these functions. For a clearer understanding we give the solutions of a couple of elementary exercises regarding these functions.

Keywords
Normalized B-spline basis functions, explicit expression, system of normal equations, Weibull plot, Bairstow’s iteration method

How to build a dissemination and communication strategy in a world where users have easy access to a deluge of data and information from various origins and where IT tools and design standards change so quickly that users behaviour and their expectations are continuously modified? The first challenge of Eurostat is clearly to know what users want: we know our different types of users but we have to identify how they get our data, what they do with our data, how they react to our outputs and which sort of new service they would like us to propose. Translating these needs into a visual dissemination is a new challenge undertaken by Eurostat through a new portal, new mobile apps and new info graphs and basic application as well as increasing the visibility on Google. The objective of this paper is to share Eurostat's experience in identifying user Leeds and to show how concretely this information has been visually disseminated.

Keywords
Visual dissemination, user behaviour, user needs, user feedback