In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. While poverty reduction has been a mainstay of the World Bank s mission for decades, the Bank has now set a specific goal and timetable, and for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all. The discussion until now has centered primarily on articulating the new goals. This report, the latest in World Bank s Policy Research Report series, goes beyond that and lays out their conceptual underpinnings, discusses their relative strengths and weaknesses by contrasting them with alternative indicators, and proposes empirical approaches and requirements to track progress towards the goals. The report makes clear that the challenges posed by the World Bank Group s new stance extend not just to the pursuit of these goals but, indeed, to their very definition and empirical content. The report also argues that an improved data infrastructure, consisting of many elements including the collection of more and better survey data, is critical to ensure that progress towards these goals can be measured, and policies to help achieve them can be identified and prioritized."

Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Economics - Statistics and Methods, grade: 1, Bielefeld University, language: English, abstract: Ziel der Arbeit ist es den seit langem wissenschaftlich diskutierten Zusammenhang zwischen Inflation und Arbeitslosigkeit, die Phillips-Kurve, mit Hilfe neuer statistischer Methoden zu untersuchen und seine verschiedenen Auspragungen bei den G7-Staaten miteinander zu vergleichen. Dabei werden zwei weitere Einflusse, Produktivitat und Inflationsklima, miteinbezogen. Der erste Teil fuhrt in die Diskussion der Phillips-Kurve ein. Im Folgenden werden die zur Analyse notwendigen Nichtparametrischen Verfahren vorgestellt und eingehend beschrieben. Die Analyse und der Vergleich der G7-Phillips-Kurven wird im vierten Kapitel durchgefuhrt. Im Anschluss daran folgt eine Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse und ein Ausblick.

In 1958 the Canadian Political Science Association established a committee to look into ways and means of improving statistical research in the social sciences in Canada. One of the ways in which the committee thought this could be done was by establishing an annual forum where papers could be presented and discussed. Eight papers given at the first Conference at Queen's University are contained in this volume. Diverse alike in subject and statistical method---as indeed a collection of papers reflecting the purpose of the founding committee is bound to be---the papers as printed incorporate the discussion that attended their presentation in 1960. The papers are: K.A.H. Buckley, "Historical Estimates of Internal Migration in Canada,"; Richard E. Du Wurs, Robert Batson, Margaret Daffron, "The 'Mass Society' and 'Community' Analyses of the Social Present"; P.J. Giffen, "Canadian Criminal Statistics"; E.J. Hanson, "The Post-war Rise of the Crude Petroleum Industry"; Gideon Rosenbluth, "Salaries of Engineers and Scientists, 1951"; David N. Solomon, Agnes M. Fergusson, "The Distribution and Functions of Canadian Engineers and Scientists"; K.W. Studnicki-Gizbert, "The Structure and Growth of the Canadian Air Transport Industry"; T.R. Vout, "The Canadian Manufacturing Industry, 1900-57."

The document focuses on the importance of studying Bayesian approach so as to analyze the impact of foreign direct investment on macroeconomics of the Yemen Republic. In probability theory and statistics, Bayes' theorem (alternatively Bayes' law) is a theorem with two distinct interpretations. In the Bayesian interpretation, it expresses how a subjective degree of belief should rationally change to account for evidence. In the frequentist interpretation, it relates inverse representations of the probabilities concerning two events. In the Bayesian interpretation, Bayes' theorem is fundamental to Bayesian statistics, and has applications in fields including science, engineering, economics (particularly microeconomics), game theory, medicine and law. The application of Bayes' theorem to update beliefs is called Bayesian inference.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2000 in the subject Business economics - Didactics, Economic Pedagogy, grade: 1, -, language: English, abstract: Writers on management and organisational excellence today provide a set of prescriptions which they argue will lead to healthy, well functioning firms. Within the management sciences there has been a growing tendency to view organisations as complex systems, that is, to describe them as organisms. Increasingly the hard sciences are being used to describe and analyse organisations. In the field of creative problem solving several systems authors have advocated the use of metaphors to describe certain aspects of organisations. In reviewing much of today's management literature we are exhorted to use benchmarks, for a variety of management tasks. In reviewing organisational excellence we are duty bound to find a measure that will be relevant tomorrow as well as today. Conjoining these current themes in management, this thesis seeks to review what we know about the effective collective functioning of selected species and to compare these natural systems with organisational systems. We posit the question: Can an understanding of the functioning of natural systems help us to understand how organisations function. If so, what can we learn about the effective functioning of organisations. Firstly we will review common management theories, with a focus on organisational learning and knowledge management. Secondly we will look at three natural organisations: Honey bees, leaf-cutter ants and the African locust. We want to find out how these organisations function, and specifically search for knowledge management and organisational learning within these biological systems. Then we will try to link management theories with our findings in natural organisations. This approach will finally deliver some interesting hypothesis about knowledge management and organisational learning - both valid for human and natural organisations.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut fur Humangeographie), course: Mobilitat 2.0 - Soziale Veranderungen und Zukunft der Mobilitat, language: English, abstract: In an era of information and communication technologies, imaginative and virtual travel have not substituted physical travel but resulted in a network society of multiple mobilities. People are increasingly mobile for maintaining their professional and private social relationships in intermittent face-to-face meetings. So far, we do not know much about the interrelation between travel mobility and social network services (SNSs). With the example of Facebook as the dominating, undisputed SNS of 845 million monthly active users, I will argue how 'place'-focused features are put under the spotlight of Facebook users' activities and perceived character. As a platform combining various services, tools, and applications also of third parties, Facebook can influence its users' mobility habits and expectations of physical traveling. This brings with it important implications for research and practice, since foremostly young generations are concerned and will thus influence future developments.

Interest in the skew-normal and related families of distributions has grown enormously over recent years, as theory has advanced, challenges of data have grown, and computational tools have made substantial progress. This comprehensive treatment, blending theory and practice, will be the standard resource for statisticians and applied researchers. Assuming only basic knowledge of (non-measure-theoretic) probability and statistical inference, the book is accessible to the wide range of researchers who use statistical modelling techniques. Guiding readers through the main concepts and results, it covers both the probability and the statistics sides of the subject, in the univariate and multivariate settings. The theoretical development is complemented by numerous illustrations and applications to a range of fields including quantitative finance, medical statistics, environmental risk studies, and industrial and business efficiency. The author's freely available R package sn, available from CRAN, equips readers to put the methods into action with their own data.

From reviews of previous editions

"The State of Working America remains unrivaled as the most-trusted source for a comprehensive understanding of how working Americans and their families are faring in today's economy." Robert B. Reich

"It is the inequality of wealth, argue the authors, rather than new technology (as some would have it), that is responsible for the failure of America's workplace to keep pace with the country's economic growth. The State of Working America is a well-written, soundly argued, and important reference book." Library Journal

"An indispensable work on family income, wages, taxes, employment, and the distribution of wealth. New York Review of Books

Since 1988, The State of Working America has provided a comprehensive answer to a question newly in vogue in this age of Occupy Wall Street: To what extent has overall economic growth translated into rising living standards for the vast majority of American workers and their families? In the 12th edition, Lawrence Mishel, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Heidi Shierholz analyze a trove of data on income, jobs, mobility, poverty, wages, and wealth to demonstrate that rising economic inequality over the past three decades has decoupled overall economic growth from growth in the living standards of the vast majority.

The new edition of The State of Working America also expands on this analysis of American living standards, most notably by placing the Great Recession in historical context. The severe economic downturn that began in December 2007 came on the heels of a historically weak recovery following the 2001 recession, a recovery that saw many measures of living standards stagnate. The authors view the past decade as lost in terms of living standards growth, and warn that millions of American households face another decade of lost opportunity.

Especially troubling, the authors stress, is that while overall economic performance in the decades before the Great Recession was more than sufficient to broadly raise living standards, broad-based growth was blocked by rising inequality driven largely by policy choices. A determinedly data-driven narrative, The State of Working America remains the most comprehensive resource about the economic experience of working Americans."

This is a textbook designed for undergraduate and graduate students and is the result of the author's more than twenty years of involvement with econometrics as both teacher and researcher. It contains theory, problems and answers, many of which have already been tested extensively in classrooms and tutorials and then refined for the book. It includes the following topics: Single equation regressions Dummy and limited dependent variable models Simultaneous equations models Dynamic regression models Unit roots Cointegration and error correction models ggregation over time issues Forecasting and panel data models The book does not attempt to duplicate the many standard econometrics books. Rather, it supplements them by focusing exclusively on theoretical and empirical exercises in a systematic way. Although much of the material has a Caribbean flavour, its rigorous and clear presentation will appeal to students and teachers worldwide.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Statistics and Methods, grade: 1,3, University of Tubingen, language: English, comment: empirische Arbeit, abstract: Rating agencies play an important role on the capital markets; however, during the financial crisis 2007-2009 people began to question how good their assessments of credit quality really are. In my study, I empirically examine the effect of rating announcements from Standard & Poor's on the Credit Default Swap (CDS) Market. It contributes to the field of rating agencies' performance measurement. Based on Event Study Methodology and recent CDS data, I detect virtually no significant abnormal spread change at the announcement date neither for downgrades nor upgrades. However, the CDS show some anticipation prior to the event especially for downgradings. Considering the rating date, I find evidence for an asymmetric reaction where downgrades cause stronger movement in the spreads. As a result, it seems as if rating changes do not convey a great part of new information to the markets. At the same time, the significant anticipation indicates that the CDS market processes information more efficiently.

No one can deny the obvious link between statistics and sports, and many a sports fan can reel off a lengthy list of statistics about a favorite team or player. The anthology "A Sports-Oriented Approach to Introductory Statistics" cleverly combines the study of statistics with the high interest area of sports to create a text that delivers an engaging and effective introduction to statistical principles.
The first several chapters of the book are the statistical and mathematical offensive linemen, often overlooked and under-appreciated, but necessary for gaining a firm understanding of theory and statistics. This prepares students for the principles covered in subsequent chapters.
These later chapters are the skill players of the text, and through them students learn things like how to predict points in the NHL, determine if there is a home field advantage in football, and compare MLB teams to find out if statistically any one team has been the worst over the past ten years.
Each example in the book uses real data from the sports world. The central limit theorem is explained by examining salary data from major league baseball. Understanding probability distribution of a discrete random variable is illustrated through the number of goals scored in the World Cup. Regression analysis is explored through evaluating team performance.
Each chapter of the text includes examples, accompanied by complete, step-by-step solutions. All problems require students to produce extended, well-thought-out answers using the target principles. Symbols and formulas used within chapters are organized at the end of the chapters for easy reference.
This unique approach increases student interest, and delivers important content in a relatable, likeable format. "A Sports-Oriented Approach to Introductory Statistics" is written for courses in elementary, undergraduate statistics, and is an ideal supplement to standard required texts. The text can also be used as a supplemental text in many math and business courses grounded in statistics.
Andrew Wiesner earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently he is a Lecturer of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Wiesner has been teaching statistics for more than ten years. He successfully combined his passion for education with a life-long love of sports, and supervised several undergraduate Honors theses in which students analyze sports data.

The series, Contemporary Perspectives on Data Mining, is composed of blind refereed scholarly research methods and applications of data mining. This series will be targeted both at the academic community, as well as the business practitioner. Data mining seeks to discover knowledge from vast amounts of data with the use of statistical and mathematical techniques. The knowledge is extracted form this data by examining the patterns of the data, whether they be associations of groups or things, predictions, sequential relationships between time order events or natural groups. Data mining applications are seen in finance (banking, brokerage, insurance), marketing (customer relationships, retailing, logistics, travel), as well as in manufacturing, health care, fraud detection, home-land security, and law enforcement.

Statistics is the branch of mathematics that deals with real-life problems. As such, it is an essential tool for economists. Unfortunately, the way you and many other economists learn the concept of statistics is not compatible with the way economists think and learn. The problem is worsened by the use of mathematical jargon and complex derivations. Here's a book that proves none of this is necessary. All the examples and exercises in this book are constructed within the field of economics, thus eliminating the difficulty of learning statistics with examples from fields that have no relation to business, politics, or policy. Statistics is, in fact, not more difficult than economics. Anyone who can comprehend economics can understand and use statistics successfully within this field, including you This book utilizes Microsoft Excel to obtain statistical results, as well as to perform additional necessary computations. Microsoft Excel is not the software of choice for performing sophisticated statistical analysis. However, it is widely available, and almost everyone has some degree of familiarity with it. Using Excel will eliminate the need for students and readers to buy and learn new software, the need that itself would prove to be another impediment to learning and using statistics.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Didactics, Economic Pedagogy, grade: 1,7, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (Fakultat fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften), course: Cross Cultural Competence, language: English, abstract: Presentations are ways of communicating ideas and information to a group. Presentation skills and public speaking skills are very useful in many aspects of work and life, may they be in business, sales and selling, training, teaching, lecturing and generally entertaining an audience. Developing the confidence and capability to give good presentations, and to stand up in front of an audience and speak well, are also extremely helpful competencies for self development. Even if the formats and purposes of presentations vary significantly, for example: oral (spoken), multimedia (using various media, visuals, audio, etc), PowerPoint presentations, short impromptu presentations, long planned presentations, educational or training sessions, lectures, or simply giving a talk on a subject to a group on a voluntary basis for pleasure, all successful presentations will generally use the essential techniques and structures explained here. Aside from presentation, technique, confidence, experience and preparation are key factors. This paper will give you a good overview of key presentation and public speaking elements, aspects to consider while preparing and useful pointers for the final delivery. In the second part I will touch on the subject of speaking to an international audience while the final segment will touch on the importance of presentation and public speaking skills in today's business world.

2012 Reprint of 1925 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Irving Fisher was an American economist, inventor, and social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the Post-Keynesian school. As a student, Fisher had shown particular talent and inclination for mathematics, but he found that economics offered greater scope for his ambition and social concerns. His thesis, published by Yale in 1892 as "Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices," was a rigorous development of the theory of general equilibrium. When he began writing the thesis, Fisher had not been aware that Leon Walras and his continental European disciples had already covered similar ground. Nonetheless, Fisher's work was a very significant contribution and was immediately recognized and praised as first-rate by such European masters as Francis Edgeworth. Contains an preface written by Fisher for the 1925 edition published by Yale.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2010 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: Cum Laude, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: The overall objective of this study is to examine the potential of introducing renewable biomass for a decentralized household energy provision in rural areas at the Kenyan South Coast. The main question posed in this research is whether the renewable products of an oil tree and related energy end-use appliances could potentially be a cheap, widely available and socially accepted substitute for kerosene and traditional biomass. The research data and results are based on a UNDP GEF SGP funded pilot project. The project was conceptualized by the author and implemented with local communities with support from the German Development Service (DED), the World Wide Fund (WWF) and various government institutions in Kwale District between 2006 and 2010. The first theoretical part of this study describes the negative socio-economic, environmental and health related impacts of the current household energy provision and energy use in Developing Countries (DCs). It becomes obvious that the households' strong dependency on kerosene and traditional biomass severely hampers the achievement of national and international development goals. The potentials and barriers when introducing renewable energy technologies (RETs) in DCs are presented by using selected project examples. The discussion emphasizes that not only economical, institutional and infrastructural factors contribute to the low dissemination rates of RETs in DCs but also the social acceptance by potential users. Finally the results from this investigation are used to discuss the current and future household energy provision in Kenya. The second part of the study elaborates on the possibility of sustainably introducing the oil tree Jatropha curcas L. as a bioenergy source to rural households. For that purpose the feasibility of introducing t

200 socio and macro-economic indicators, more than 600 tables, over 200 full-colour charts. Exciting and engaging presentation. Hundreds of illustrations. Tons of rigourous analyses. Insightful and pithy running commentary. Overall, an entirely absorbing and engaging volume. And quite possibly the most comprehensive comparative study yet done of Sub-Saharan Africa economies. This manual is an exhaustive macro-economic survey of all 48 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, as they performed during the 10 years leading to 2009/2010. It presents an in-depth portrait of their investment, economic, and business climates, through hundreds of extensive analyses. Data is gathered from a dozen veritable multilateral agencies including the World Bank, IMF, UNCTAD, UNICEF and the WTO. The 48 countries are ranked at several turns for hundreds of different economic properties and outcomes. Then there is an overall ranking conclusion in the final chapter. Thus, a climactic outcome of this exploration is the emergence of a yearly index (Dba Index, Ratings & Ranking) which, for the first time, engages Africa's economies across the entire spectrum of social, economic and business activity. The exploration delves deeper for West Africa, placing its 16 countries in comparative league tables of performance during contiguous four-year phases leading up to 2009-2010, and also for projections into the future, where possible. A lively running commentary threads through every chapter, picking up salient points and inferences. It tells its many stories from the perspective of West Africa's largest economy - Nigeria. Doing Business in West Africa will prove useful for businesses, multinational corporations, governments, diplomatic missions, development agencies, educational and research institutions; any organisation with significant interests and functions in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will be published in the first quarter of every year, with updated and re-analysed data.

Chris Albright's VBA FOR MODELERS, 4E, International Edition is an essential tool for helping students learn to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as a means to automate common spreadsheet tasks, as well as to create sophisticated management science applications. VBA is the programming language for Microsoft (R) Office. VBA FOR MODELERS, 4E, International Edition contains two parts. The first part teaches students the essentials of VBA for Excel. The second part illustrates how a number of management science models can be automated with VBA. From a user's standpoint, these applications hide the details of the management science techniques and instead present a simple user interface for inputs and results.

Doubt over the trustworthiness of published empirical results is not unwarranted and is often a result of statistical mis-specification: invalid probabilistic assumptions imposed on data. Now in its second edition, this bestselling textbook offers a comprehensive course in empirical research methods, teaching the probabilistic and statistical foundations that enable the specification and validation of statistical models, providing the basis for an informed implementation of statistical procedure to secure the trustworthiness of evidence. Each chapter has been thoroughly updated, accounting for developments in the field and the author's own research. The comprehensive scope of the textbook has been expanded by the addition of a new chapter on the Linear Regression and related statistical models. This new edition is now more accessible to students of disciplines beyond economics and includes more pedagogical features, with an increased number of examples as well as review questions and exercises at the end of each chapter.