What really matters is the economic performance: Positioning tourist destinations by means of perceptual maps

The present study aims to cluster the world's main tourist destinations according to the growth of the economic performance of the tourist activity and of the tourist and economic development experienced during the last decade. With this objective, we combine the information from a set of tourist and economic indicators for the main 45 tourist destinations over the period between 2000 and 2010. Destinations are ranked with respect to their average growth rate over the sample period. By assigning a numerical value to each country corresponding to its position, all the information is summarised into two components (“economic performance of tourist activity” and “tourist and economic development”) via multivariate techniques for dimensionality reduction: multidimensional scaling (MDS) and categorical principal components analysis (CATPCA). By means of perceptual maps, we find that destinations can be clustered into four different groups. The first one, dominated by Western and Northern Europe markets, contains some of the top destinations (France, Spain and the United States). A second one, with a predominance of Mediterranean destinations (Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Israel), obtains high scores in both dimensions. In the third one, we find Cambodia and China, alongside Egypt and Turkey. Finally, a fourth group dominated by Eastern Europe destinations (Bulgaria, Croatia and Latvia) with low scores in both dimensions

Análisis de las expectativas y el rendimiento del alumnado ante la implantación de un sistema de evaluación continua

Este trabajo se centra en el análisis del impacto de la introducción de un sistema de evaluación continua sobre las expectativas y el rendimiento de los alumnos de la asignatura de Estadística del nuevo grado de Relaciones Laborales de la Universidad de Barcelona. El procedimiento metodológico seguido parte de la realización de dos encuestas, una al inicio y otra a final del curso, con el objetivo de recoger las expectativas iniciales y las percepciones finales de los alumnos de la asignatura. A continuación, se lleva a cabo un análisis estadístico de la información recogida, analizando si existen diferencias significativas en las expectativas de los alumnos entre ambos cuestionarios. Finalmente, se cruza la información de ambas encuestas con el rendimiento observado con el objetivo de detectar los elementos sobre los cuales se puede actuar para potenciar el rendimiento del alumnado

Forecasting the unemployment rate using the degree of agreement in consumer unemployment expectations

This study aims to refine unemployment forecasts by incorporating the degree of consensus in consumers' expectations. With this objective, we first model the unemployment rate in eight European countries using the step-wise algorithm proposed by Hyndman and Khandakar (J Stat Softw 27(3):1-22, 2008). The selected optimal autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are then used to generate out-of-sample recursive forecasts of the unemployment rates, which are used as benchmark. Finally, we replicate the forecasting experiment including as predictors both an indicator of unemployment, based on the degree of agreement in consumer unemployment expectations, and a measure of disagreement based on the dispersion of expectations. In both cases, we obtain an improvement in forecast accuracy in most countries. These results reveal that the degree of agreement in consumers' expectations contains useful information to predict unemployment rates, especially for the detection of turning points

Positioning emerging tourism markets using tourism and economic indicators

Most tourism research is centred in the world's top tourism destinations. The present study focuses on the interactions between tourism and economic variables in twenty emerging markets. First, we provide a descriptive analysis and we rank the countries according to their percentage average annual growth in relation to a set of economic and tourism indicators during the last decade. By means of categorical principal component analysis we synthesize all the information of the rankings into two components: growth in the contribution of tourism to economic activity, and growth in hotel accommodation. Finally, we project all twenty destinations in a two-dimensional perceptual map. We obtain four clusters of destinations: Mali and Madagascar, with the top positions in terms of growth of the economic contribution of tourism; on the other extreme, Jamaica, Cyprus, Croatia, Portugal and Ireland, which are the more mature markets; Botswana, Bulgaria, and New Zealand, with the top positions regarding the growth in hotel accommodation; and in the opposite situation, the Republic of Moldova, which in spite of a moderate growth in hotel accommodation, has experienced a high increase in the contribution of tourism to economic activity. These results aim to shed light on the relative positioning of emerging destinations with respect to their potential competitors

¿Puede ayudar la evaluación continua a mejorar el rendimiento de los alumnos?

Este trabajo se centra en el análisis del impacto de la introducción de un sistema de evaluación continua sobre el rendimiento de los alumnos de la asignatura de Estadística de la Diplomatura de Relaciones Laborales de la Universidad de Barcelona. El procedimiento metodológico seguido ha sido el diseño de una encuesta realizada entre los alumnos de la asignatura. A continuación se lleva a cabo un análisis estadístico de la información recogida y se compara con el rendimiento observado. A partir de los resultados obtenidos se pretenden definir los elementos sobre los cuales se puede actuar para potenciar el rendimiento del alumnado

Measuring and assessing economic uncertainty

This paper evaluates the dynamic response of economic activity to shocks in agents’ perception of uncertainty. The study focuses on the comparison between manufacturers 'and consumers' perception of economic uncertainty. Since uncertainty is not directly observable, we approximate it using the geometric discrepancy indicator of Claveria et al. (2019). This approach allows us quantifying the proportion of disagreement in business and consumer expectations of eleven European countries and the Euro Area. First, we compute three independent indices of discrepancy corresponding to three dimensions of uncertainty (economic, inflation and employment) and we average them to obtain aggregate disagreement measures for businesses and for consumers (…

On the aggregation of survey-based economic uncertainty indicators between different agents and across variables

We analyse the effects of aggregating the level of disagreement in survey-based expectations. With this aim, we construct several indicators based on two metrics of disagreement: the standard deviation of the balance and a geometric measure of discrepancy. We use data from business and consumer surveys in eleven European countries and the Euro Area. We evaluate the dynamic response of economic growth to shocks in agents' uncertainty gauged by the discrepancy measures in a bivariate vector autoregressive framework. We find that while the effect on economic activity to a shock in aggregate discrepancy is always negative for firms' disagreement, the effect to consumers' disagreement is positive in all countries except Italy. To shed some light regarding the effect of aggregating disagreement both across variables and economic agents on forecast accuracy, we also examine the predictive performance of the discrepancy indicators, using them to generate out-of-sample forecasts of economic growth. We do not find evidence that the aggregation of disagreement improves forecast accuracy. These findings are especially relevant when using cross-sectional dispersion of survey-based expectations of firms and households

Evolution of business and consumer uncertainty in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. A sector analysis in 32 European countries

This paper examines the evolution of business and consumer uncertainty amid the Coronavirus pandemic in 32 European countries and the European Union (EU). Since uncertainty is not directly observable, we approximate it using the geomètric discrepancy indicator of Claveria et al. (2019). This approach allows us quantifying the proportion of disagreement in Business and consumer expectations of 32 countries. We have used information from all monthly forward-looking questions contained in Joint Harmonised Programme of Business and Consumer Surveys conducted by the European Commission (EC): the industry survey, the service survey, the retail trade survey, the building survey and the consumer survey (...

A new consensus-based unemployment indicator

In this study we present a novel approach to measure the level of consensus among agents' expectations. The proposed framework allows us to design a positional indicator that gives the percentage of agreement between survey expectations. While other aggregation methods such as the balance, which is constructed as the difference between the percentages of respondents giving positive and negative replies, explicitly omit the neutral information, the proposed metric allows synthesizing the information coming from all response categories, including the percentage of respondents who do not expect any change. In order to assess the performance of the proposed measure of consensus, we compare its ability to track the evolution of unemployment to that of the balance in eight European countries. With this aim, we scale both measures to generate one-period ahead forecasts of the unemployment rate. We find that the consensus-based unemployment indicator outperforms the balance in all countries except Denmark and Sweden, which suggests that the level of agreement among agents' expectations is a good predictor of unemployment

Modelling the dynamic interaction between economic uncertainty, growth, unemployment and suicide

Economic uncertainty is a driver of the business cycle. In a recent study, Claveria (2022) used a fixed-effects model to assess the impact of uncertainty on suicide rates worldwide. Using that same panel, in which global economic uncertainty is linked to the evolution of the suicide rates in 183 countries between 2000 and 2019, this work evaluates the dynamic interconnections between unemployment, economic growth, uncertainty and suicide using a dynamic panel model. Overall, the analysis suggests that increases in the growth of economic uncertainty and unemployment may lead to increases in suicide rates growth worldwide. When replicating the experiment for different regions and for groups of countries classified according to their level of income, the greatest impact of increases in economic uncertainty is found in upper middle-income economies. Given the anticipatory nature of econòmic uncertainty with respect to the evolution of the economy, and its relationship with suicide rates, the obtained results suggest the usefulness of uncertainty indicators as tools for the early detection of periods of increased suicide risk and for the design of suicide prevention strategie