Course Overview

The aim of these half-day modules is to enable students develop a better understanding of economic statistics and its uses in the policy making arena. This includes interpreting and analysing economic statistics while understanding its limitations.

Course Quick Facts Course Facts

Duration

Each module Duration: Half Day

Cost

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Location Location

London

Learning Outcomes Outcomes

  • Better understand the messages economic statistics can convey
  • Appreciate the arguments for alternative approaches to the definition, collection and analysis of economic statistics
  • Ensure the appropriateness and robustness of economic statistics on which policy is to be based
  • More effectively present the messages economic statistics can deliver

Course Details Info

Alternative measures of economic growth – This topic will look at the limitations of existing measures of economic activity and recent developments in economic statistics that have emerged as a result. It also covers the challenges of measuring government activity in the UK and its contribution to economic growth.

This topic will examine all the statistics in public domain that could be used to furnish a fuller understanding of the UK labour market. It will look at limitations of existing measures, the demand for and supply of labour and practical uses of labour market statistics in the policy arena.

This topic will examine the three measures of the midpoint; measures of dispersion; the basic concepts of skew and kurtosis; a simple non-technical introduction to the Law of Large Numbers, and the normal and lognormal distributions; the principles of sampling, and its use in national accounts and statistics. Correlation and covariance, statistical significance, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals will also be covered.

This topic will examine how economic variables move over time, and how to draw inferences about what drives them. It will focus on an intuitive approach to econometrics rather than detailed technical derivations.

This topic will look at the uses of cross sectional and panel data in identifying the patterns of association between economic and social variables at disaggregated levels.

Economic statistics play a vital role in driving policy in our society. This topic will examine how they contribute to the evidence base and their use/misuse in the policy arena.

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