Methods for small area estimation have received much attention in recent years due to growing demand for reliable small area statistics that are needed in formulating policies and programs, allocation of government funds, making business decisions and so on. Traditional area-specific direct...

The popular impression that Africa has not integrated into world trade, as suggested by the evolution in simple indicators, has been called into question recently by more formal analysis. This paper refines and generalizes this analysis and lends support to the popular view of disintegration,...

The problem of forecasting the economic systems' activity over a large time horizon is the main concern of both the researchers in the economic field and the system managers. In most cases, its solving is reduced to simulating the structure of the economic indicators which render the system...

Latin America faces a growing concentration of banking markets, situation that worries both the public and the media for its potential impact on competition, access to credit at competitive rates, and thus the potential impact on its economic and social development. This paper provides a brief...

This article empirically investigates the volatility spillover of stock returns from the market to disaggregated industry sectors. Seventeen sectors from the US and UK stock markets are estimated by the GARCH technique based on daily data from 1973 to 2008. The key findings are two-fold. In the...

The Pareto distribution is a heavy-tailed distribution often used in actuarial models. It is important for modeling losses in insurance claims, especially when we used it to calculate the probability of an extreme event. Traditionally, maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and we...

Investment in infrastructure such as the information and communication technology sector requires large, substantial amounts, most of which are sunk or irreversible. Uncertainty of market demand, competition, costs and public policy complicates the investment decision process. This paper...

We investigate the relationship between female labour force participation and economic growth in the South Mediterranean countries with a two-step methodology of econometric exercise and general equilibrium modelling. Econometric estimations on female labour participation confirm the U-shaped...

Recently, a new test for nonlinearity and chaos was proposed, the noise titration technique. I discuss in this paper its relevance for the case of economic time series. I apply the test on two relevant datasets for which previous assessments exist, both simulated and real data. Compared to other...