The 2014 Electricity Profiles publication provides an overall picture of the electricity sector of over 200 countries and areas on an internationally comparable basis, for the years 2009-2014. It displays detailed information on production, trade and consumption of electricity, on net installed capacity and thermal power plant inputs and efficiency relevant to each of these countries and areas. This is the third issue of Electricity Profiles as a stand-alone publication, replacing the previous series of Energy Balances and Electricity Profiles.

The 2014 Energy Balances publication presents energy data for over 200 countries and areas in a format which shows the overall picture of the yearly production, trade, transformation and consumption of energy products utilized in each country or area shown, for the years 2013 and 2014. Such a format, presented in a common energy unit, the Terajoule, is useful in assessing and analysing supply and consumption patterns across both products and countries in detail on an internationally comparable basis. It is the third issue of Energy Balances as a stand-alone publication, replacing the previous series of Energy Balances and Electricity Profiles. The standards brought about by the International Recommendations for Energy Statistics (IRES) have been incorporated.

This publication is compiled to provide quality and timely statistical data for the monitoring, evaluation, analysis, research, and promotion of the intra-African trade. It is intended to serve the needs of researchers, policy makers, and the public who work on trade issues. This seventh edition of the Compendium presents foreign trade data in sixteen chapters for all African countries for the period 2004 to 2012. Information on total, share, direction, and evolution of African trade is provided. Focusing on intra-African trade, related statistical data of trade flows are grouped by region, subregions, and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa, a unique feature that has been found nowhere else. It is hoped that the Compendium will provide the needed support to ongoing efforts aimed at ensuring the integration of the African continent.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Economics - Statistics and Methods, grade: none, - (University for Development Studies, Tamale), language: English, abstract: The study is an attempt to build a univariate Time Series Model to forecast monthly petroleum prices for 2010/2011, from January 1990 to September 2010, since national petroleum agency (NPA) is failing to plan for fluctuation of petroleum prices. The data was source from the website of Bank of Ghana. The study employs Box-Jenkins methodology of building Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model to achieve various objectives. Different selected models were tested by Residual plots of Autocorrelation and Partial Autocorrelation and Ljung Box Q statistic to ensure adequacy of results. The results reveal that demand and supply, crudel oil prices, gasoline, natural disasters and government regulations are some of factors that can influence fuel prices and ARIMA(1,1,5)x(1,0,1)11 is the best model for forecast. The future values expose that during the months to come; petroleum prices are going to experience an insignificant increase. In light of the forecast, I know Ghana will ascertain a healthy state of economy.

This year's edition of International Debt Statistics, successor to Global Development Finance and World Debt Tables, and the fourth in the series, is designed to respond to user demand for timely, comprehensive data on trends in external debt in low- and middle-income countries. It also provides summary information on the external debt of high-income countries and public (domestic and external) debt for a select group of countries. The World Bank's Debtor Reporting System (DRS), from which the aggregate and country tables presented in this report are drawn, wasestablished in 1951. World Debt Tables, the first publication that included DRS external debt data, appeared in 1973 and gained increased attention during the debt crisis of the 1980s. Since then, the publication and data have undergone numerous revisions and iterations to address the challenges and demands posed by the global economic conditions. Presentation and access to data have been refined to improve the user experience. The printed edition of International Debt Statistics 2016 now provides a summary overview and a select set of indicators, while an expanded dataset is available online (datatopics.worldbank.org / debt/ids).

Statistical designs, sample surveys and evaluation designs are fundamental tools for solving queries related to population parameters and the effects of public programs and policies. This book explores the concepts of effective sampling and evaluation techniques in a cohesive and concise manner. Sampling design techniques, including simple random sampling, stratified sampling, systematic sampling and cluster sampling, are presented in detail. These techniques play a vital role when choosing an appropriate sample survey design. The concepts of multistage design, non-sampling errors and evaluation techniques including before-after design, one-time treatment and control design are discussed extensively. The book focuses on different methods of estimation, including multiple regression analysis and logistic regression. It covers the issue of bias in a design, the source of such bias and ways to overcome it. Clear guidelines with remedial measures are outlined to facilitate choosing a suitable sampling design.

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 6 (Schweiz), University of Zurich (Geographisches Institut), language: English, abstract: This study supports, that culture influences the relationship between organizational change and human failure. An analysis of global large loss events shows, that more than half of all losses can be backtracked to a human failure. A closer look at the organizational background of these human failure losses indicates additionally, that two thirds of them occurred after or during organizational changes of the employer. Because human performance is also dependent on cultural factors, this thesis investigates whether the established relationship between organizational changes and human failure features a cultural pattern of occurrence as well. In order to render an acceptable degree of comparison, the loss events are aligned on Hofstede's cultural dimensions, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity and long-term orientation. This study concludes, that a society's uncertainty avoidance and its individualism are related to the occurrence of large human failure loss events. While a society's high uncertainty avoidance is negatively correlated, a society's high individualism is positively correlated with human failures. It is further proposed, that a large power distance often prevents a workforce from committing human failures when their organization is changing. Trust in the vertical hierarchy gives them security. On the other side, high individualism aggravates human failures during organizational changes. The employees know that they are on their own, and that they have nobody to rely upon in insecure times.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne (Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeographisches Institut), course: The Economic Geography of the European Union, language: English, abstract: In our globalized world trade fairs are important events for firms to communicate and/or sell their products and services to a global audience. But besides this original aim of trade fairs, scientists go further and focus on the effects, which these temporary and spatial accumulations of professionals from the same or equal industries might have. According to that, a particular focus lies on inter-organizational learning processes, like they can be found in clusters. Thus, the central question of this report derives, whether in the European context trade fairs can be seen as temporary clusters, which would imply that trade fairs became central nodes connecting global economy. This issue is important, since both participating in trade fairs and searching for adequate interaction partners are costly and time intensive processes. If trade fairs provided equal benefits as temporary clusters, organizing and participating entities would expend more effort on planning and conducting the time before, during and after the trade fair. Apparently, benefiting from new knowledge pools is at least an important aspect in times of increasing innovation velocity. Finding a clear answer for the problem is not trivial, since the majority of available literature focuses on trade fairs in the context of a communication instrument in firm's marketing mix. Furthermore there are difficulties to maintain a particular focus on Europe, since globalized world economy meets on international flagship trade fairs. Another aspect is the difficulty of measuring qualitative and quantifiable effects of spatial proximity in clusters, which additionally could be implemented to compare different forms of temporary clusters.

This edition of the Export Essentials statistical series looks at export clearances through February for Canada, the United States and Australia. Gaining perspective about actual quantities of specialty crops being shipped from these countries has become more critical in the face of worries about weather in numerous key production areas in the world.

Distribution analysis has advanced remarkably in recent years, and this is a valuable application of its principles to a Canadian context. The book provides an extensive survey of recent literature and a new source of income and wealth distribution data for Ontario, drawn from newly available microdata sets. It also presents an evaluation of the data as a basis for measuring inequality in the distribution of economic and well-being. The empirical results illustrate how incomes vary significantly with age according to labour market attachment and experience, educational attainment and occupation, transfer receipts, and investment benefits. Similarly, strong age effects on net worth account reflect life-cycle patterns in asset holdings and debts typically associated with family investment in housing and financial adjustments for retirement. Differences in family size and composition have a substantial effect on the structure of family economic well-being. The inequality effects of adjusting for accrued capital gains and net worth holdings can also be quite significant. It is found that the distributional effects of CPP net benefits are considerable, although they are not as equalizing as one may have expected because of marked cohort effects. The detailed findings suggest that the life-cycle framework is a very useful one for evaluating the distributional effects of certain government programs, particularly intertemporal ones, and they underline the need for a range of different types of policies to address low income problems. The study urges greater recognition of the inequality of treatment and opportunity among different groups of the population. It also points out that conventional income distribution figures are only very imperfect estimates of the state of inequality in the underlying distribution of economic well-being.

Gender inequalities in life expectancy provide a broader picture by combining two sets of statistical measures: the usual static gap at a given point in time and the innovative S-time-distance measure as the gap in time for a given level of the indicator.

Firstly, this offers an innovative approach for looking at disparities over many units and over time. The new S-time-distance measure, expressed in time units, is easy to understand by everybody and offers a novel way to compare situations in economics, politics, business, and statistics.

Secondly, while women expect to live longer than men for 99.5 percent of the world population, the empirical results show astonishing differences among countries in gender disparity in life expectancy around the globe.

Firstly, gender disparities in life expectancy analysed in Gaptimer Report No. 2 'How much longer live women than men around the globe?' uses the theoretical concept of time distance dimension of inequality. This provides two innovative generic statistical measures S-time-distance and S-time-step to complement (not replace) the existing mostly static measures of inequality in many fields. This is an additional dimension to assess the reality that disparities can be very persuasive and a long-standing phenomenon.

" 'As Sicherl (1973, 1993) proposes ... observed time distance is a dynamic measure of temporal disparity between the two series intuitively clear, readily measurable, and in transparent units. It is suggested that one should complement conventional measures with horizontal measures.'" (Granger and Jeon, 1997) C.W.J. Granger and Y. Jeon, University of California at San Diego

The time distance measure shows the reality with new eyes. The overall life expectancy the static difference between China and Sweden was less than 10 percent (which may appear to be small) while the S-time-distance was 51 years, (which gives a very different perception of the magnitude of the gap).

Potential users of this methodology and results are very many at various levels: international and national organizations, NGOs, experts, businesses, managers, educators, students, interest groups, media, and the general public.

Secondly, one of the main points in this study are astonishing differences between countries for gender inequality in life expectancy, which are confirmed by two methods: the respective world ranks and by very large time distances between the female and male trends of life expectancy. For example, Estonia occupied rank 51 the world for females and 110 for males. On the other extreme, e.g. the rank for Qatar was 65 for females and only 12 for males. For gender disparity in life expectancy S-time-distance for the world average, i.e. the horizontal time gap between trends of female and male life expectancy amounted to 20 years, 28 years for the EU27 and 35 years for the USA, showing a large and persistent gap in favour of women.

The time distance concept can influence the perception and decisions of people when they are assessing their relative position in their surroundings, in the society and across countries over time. For the EU27 average it is shown that the time delay for life expectancy of males behind females was large at about 27 years; the relationship is very persistent and it changes very slowly.

In the EU there are 10 countries with S-time-distance delay of male behind the female life expectancy more than 30 years, for five of them more than 50 years, i.e. more than half a century. The absolute difference in gender disparity in life expectancy for 269 EU27 NUTS2 regions ranged from 2.3 to 10.9 years of life, with a median value of 5.5 years; the same median value for 3118 US counties. More detailed regional results are prepared for the UK and Italy.

This is the first volume in a two-part publication which offers a comprehensive view of the topic. Volume I: Trade by Country, compiled in May 2014, presents detailed data of 175 countries (or areas) with data on imports and exports by commodity and trading partner provided for approximateky 90 countries (or areas), representing more than 70% of world trade in 2014. Volume II: Trade by Commodity, expected to be released at the end of the year, contains the detailed tables showing international trade for 258 commodities and eleven world trade tables covering trade values and indices up to the year 2014.

C.R.M.E. is a workbook for anyone needing (or wanting) to do a research project that can stand the test of claiming scientific significance. The workbook leads the reader in a logical progression from the measurement of variables in the research design to the formulation of testable hypotheses.

I taught such a research class at the college level for twenty years and learned how few people know the meaning of significance. Even students who came into the class having taken statistics as a pre-requisite were "fuzzy" about the concepts of standard deviations, significance, and standard scores. I realized there were two reasons for this: learning out of context; that is, without seeing an application, and secondly, being overloaded with too much statistics, which led to mere confusion. Thus my approach was to include the most common types of statistical tests covering a wide spectrum of measurements and having them applied in a real research project. Once this much is learned, it is easier to branch out to more sophisticated measurements and testing.

This workbook was also used with adult students in the university's weekend program. These were students from various large corporations in the city who were finishing their undergraduate degrees. It was they who gave me the idea to share the workbook, as many of them were given research projects to do at their place of employment and gave me very positive feedback. I genuinely hope that you find it helpful as well.

Best wishes, Prof. M.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,1, University of Marburg, language: English, abstract: Context: China's rapid economic development during the last decades and recent signs of a far reaching structural shift from an industrialized export oriented economy to an economy driven by innovation, domestic consumption and services is reflected by German investment patterns inside mainland China. While the bulk of German investments were traditionally focused on industrial production, a diverse set of market drivers led to an increased investment of German Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) as well. As a sector that has been rarely researched before, German KIBS in China are an integral part of the German business community, shaping their environment in various ways. Content: This thesis aims to fill a research gap by providing a baseline study and qualitative survey on the presence, business activity and structure of German KIBS in China, as well as the function of German KIBS in Beijing as "knowledge intermediaries." Theoretical considerations for this work are based on recent KIBS-research, outlining KIBS-functions and knowledge processing mechanisms, interaction patterns with partners and the relevance proximity. Furthermore, legal and economic framework conditions for foreign service companies in China are outlined, introducing Chinese government policies, regulations and current problems which affect the work of foreign companies in China. The subsequent empirical analysis consists of two parts: A qualitative baseline study with a focus on the overall situation of German KIBS in the context of Chinese service sector development and an empirical micro analysis based on interviews, which aims to provide more detailed insights on German KIBS operations with respect to: -Market entry -China specific regulations and challenges -External network relationships -Innovation, mediatio

Three kinds of people ought to read this book. Firstly there are those who use statistics in their work: accountants, scientists, advertisers, marketers, politicians and journalists. If you are in one of these categories I would like to help you to maintain, or aspire to, a reasonable standard of honesty and integrity, so that people can trust what you say, and so that you do not even inadvertently mislead yourself as well as others. Secondly there are cynics who think statistics can never be trusted and are just tools used by liars. I want to show that they can be used properly, and also that with a little thought, we can all learn to spot the false or exaggerated claims, the non-sequitors, and the unsubstantiated assumptions. Then we will be able to see the truth when it appears. Thirdly, there are the huge number of ordinary people who get totally confused and sometimes, sadly, misled, by statistics. I want to help you make sense of what you read or hear, and be able to be confident in sorting the facts from the hype. It is for this third group that this book is really written. If the other two groups benefit, I will be glad, but if you are in this group, please read on. I hope you will enjoy it, but above all I hope it will empower you.