Quick counts from non-selected polling stations

Countless examples of misleading forecasts on behalf of both campaign and exit polls affecting, among others, British, French, and Spanish elections could be found. This has seriously damaged their image. Therefore, procedures should be used that minimize errors, especially on election night when errors are more noticeable, in order to maintain people's trust in surveys. This paper proposes a method to obtain quick and early outcome forecasts on the election night. The idea is to partly sample some (whatever) polling stations and use the consistency that polling stations show between elections to predict the final results. Model accuracy is analysed through simulation using seven different …

Weighting Elementary Prices in Consumer Price Index Construction Using Spatial Autocorrelation

The Consumer Price Indexes (CPI) are used in current economic systems to measure inflation. When constructing CPIs, however, official institutions have systematically overlooked the spatial dimension of elementary prices. Ignoring the fact that prices are collected at geographical locations implicitly implies considering prices as spatially independent, when in fact they are not. To solve this problem, this article proposes to weight basic price data by taking into account the spatial correlation they display. The weighted geometric and arithmetic means suggested generalize and improve the simple geometric and arithmetic means currently in use.

On estimating contemporaneous quarterly regional GDP

Subnational regional jurisdictions rarely have at their disposal a reasonable array of timely statistics to monitor their economic condition. In light of this, we develop a procedure that simultaneously estimates a quarterly time series for all regions of a country based upon quarterly national and annual regional data. While other such techniques exist, we suggest a temporal error structure that eliminates possible spurious jumps. Using our approach, regional analysts should now be able to distribute national growth among regions as soon as quarterly national figures are released. In a Spanish application, we detail some practicalities of the process and show that our proposal produces bet…

Outlier detection with automatic modelling: TRAMO/SEATS versus X-12-ARIMA

Declining Fertility: Implications for Regional Education Planning

The most important asset of any organisation or country is its reserve of human resource. The capacity of society to understand and successfully adapt to new situations is highly related to the levels of training and education of its individual members. The education system, therefore, is one of the main foundations of any society's future. Over the last decade, Spain and the Valencia region, in particular, have experienced precipitous drops in fertility that will inevitably reduce school enrolments. In this paper we quantify the magnitude of the reductions and, after some analysis, lay out the potential consequences for the regional education system, and for society as a whole.

A Survey of Methods to Interpolate, Distribute and Extra- polate Time Series

This survey provides an overview with a broad coverage of the literature on methods for temporal disaggregation and benchmarking. Dozens of methods, procedures and algorithms have been proposed in the statistical and economic literature to solve the problem of transforming a low-frequency series into a high-frequency one. This paper classifies and reviews the procedures, provides interesting discussion on the history of the methodological development in this literature and permits to identify the assets and drawbacks of each method, to comprehend the current state of art on the subject and to identify the topics in need of further development. It would be useful for readers who are interest…