Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of new modes of communication. Above and beyond using land line and mobile phone for voice real-time communication, people spend increasing amounts of time receiving and sending messages through social networks (e.g. Myspace or Facebook) and also...

The OECD aims to foster ‘better policies for better lives'. To this end, the OECD invites people to evaluate quality-of-life indicators according to their individual preferences, using the web-based Better Life Index. These indicators are embedded in 11 broader well-being dimensions. Our...

In the context of current economic and financial crisis a comparative analysis of the main indices of economic and social performance of the EU member states is necessary. In such line of argument, the authors propose, as novelty, an economic power-economic performance matrix as a methodological...

The present paper explores, both theoretically and empirically, the bias of unit value indices as opposed to genuine price indices in foreign trade. An analysis of German data reveals conceptual and methodological differences, and their impact on economic indicators, namely imported inflation,...

Inflation rates of more than 3% in Germany during some months in the spring and summer of 2008 have been giving rise to claims from both politicians and the unions for social measures for welfare recipients. It is argued that the burden of inflation is heterogeneously distributed among different...

I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which ultimately is the foundation of every decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, clarifies...

The measurement of gender inequalities has become an important topic in the academic literature. First, appropriate indicators are needed to compare the relative situation of women in developing countries. Second, there is renewed attention given to the relationship between gender inequality and...

While there has been some debate over the usefulness of monetary aggregates, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the actual implications for liquidity. In this paper, we provide an approximation of the liquidity development in six Euro area countries from 2003 to 2012. We show that...

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB's CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress...

Including disaggregate variables or using information extracted from the disaggregate variables into a forecasting model for an eco- nomic aggregate may improve the forecasting accuracy. In this paper we suggest to use boosting as a method to select the disaggregate variables which are most...