Latest Employment Data from ONS

Tourism Spending

Real spending on travel and tourism increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter of 2011 after increasing 2.8 percent (revised) in the first quarter. Growth in travel and tourism outpaced growth in real gross domestic product (GDP), which increased 1.0 percent in the second quarter after increasing 0.4 percent in the first quarter. The growth in real spending on tourism primarily reflected increases in total transportation and in recreation and entertainment.

Overall growth in prices for travel and tourism goods and services remained high, increasing 7.3 percent in the second quarter of 2011 following an 8.5 percent (revised) increase in the first quarter. The growth in prices for travel and tourism goods and services reflected increases in prices for traveler accommodations and for gasoline.

Definitions: 
Tourism spending. Tourism spending comprises all goods and services purchased by tourists (defined as people who travel for any reason). In the following tables, tourism spending is referred to as direct tourism output.

Indirect tourism-related spending. Indirect tourism-related spending comprises all output used as inputs in the process of producing direct tourism output (e.g., toiletries for hotel guests and the plastic used to produce souvenir key chains).

Total tourism-related spending. Total tourism-related spending is the sum of direct tourism spending and indirect tourism-related spending.

Direct tourism employment. Direct tourism employment comprises all jobs where the workers are engaged in the production of direct tourism output (such as hotel staff, airline pilots, and souvenir sellers).

Indirect tourism-related employment. Indirect tourism-related employment comprises all jobs where the workers are engaged in the production of indirect tourism-related output (e.g., employees of companies that produce toiletries for hotel guests and the plastic used to produce souvenir key chains).

Total tourism-related employment. Total tourism-related employment is the sum of direct tourism employment and indirect tourism-related employment.

Data Watch

Since the recession ended, businesses had increased their real spending on equipment and software by a strong 26%, while they have added almost nothing to their payrolls....

You can’t fault companies for investing in new machinery rather than hiring new workers. As two news reports detail, labor costs are rising, a function of both private and public pressures.

First, employers face a jump in health insurance costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported a 9% average increase in the premiums paid by employers this year. The average yearly cost to cover a family hit a record $15,073, up sharply from $13,770 in 2010.

Related:
Annual Capital Expenditures Survey 

Random Data- Nepal's Government Revenues

Random Data- What's Bhutan's Government Revenues

The answer is it depends. See also the latest Economic Update on Bhutan from the World Bank

Egypt, Israel and Spain

Having a bit too much fun with Google Data Explorer

Google Data Explorer is cool

What's the quickest way to find public finance data on the web?

So whats the quickest way to find International Public Finance data on the web? Is it
A- Wolfram Alpha
B- World Development Indicators
C- IMF Data Mapper

Homework: Try finding the latest estimates of Bhutan's government revenues estimates?

Reading for the Weekend- paper by Kashik Basu on Indian Inflation

Understanding Inflation and controlling it

Mongolia - the Economy in Pictures

Mongolia Quarterly Economic Update, August 2011

Mongolia’s economic outlook depends heavily on global macroeconomic factors: the current uncertainty and poor growth prospects for the global economy are cause for concern. If there is another global recession, Mongolia’s small, open economy will be affected. In that case, China’s policy reaction will be crucial for Mongolia. If China reacts as fast and as strongly as it did in 2008/9 then the effects of a global recession on Mongolia will be mitigated, largely owing to Chinese demand for minerals from Mongolia. Beyond this, it is up to Mongolia to capitalize on its excellent long term prospects by continuing the reform agenda it embarked on during the 2008/9 crisis.

Why can't we get rid of the census?

The main ways of producing population statistics internationally include census type of approaches (short-form, rolling census), surveys and use of administrative sources. The Beyond 2011 Programme will investigate all these approaches and does not rule any out at this early stage...

Some data that might work is: the Council tax register, the Electoral roll, a register of patients using the NHS, Child benefit, pupils registered in schools and pension claimants data.

-Census 2011: can we do without it?

Middle East Fact of the Day- A message to Dictators and Politicians

Changes in citizens’ perceived well-being merit close attention as they provide clear messages to government which may not be obvious using traditional measures of progress.

Wellbeing in Egypt and Tunisia decreased significantly over the past few years, even as GDP increased. In Egypt, where demonstrations have prompted President Hosni Mubarak to give up power after elections this fall, the percentage of people "thriving" fell by 18 percentage points since 2005. In Tunisia, where mass protests toppled the country's government last month, the percentage of people Gallup classifies as thriving fell 10 points since 2008

Related:
Understanding How Gallup Uses the Cantril Scale

The Cantril Self-Anchoring Scale, developed by pioneering social researcher Dr. Hadley Cantril, consists of the following:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)
On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (ladder-future)

Economic History Chart of the Day- Roman Empire

via Brad Delong

Related:
Edict of Diocletian /, Robert Allen,

Assorted Monetary Policy Games

Cartoon about Price Stability

Become the ruler of Finanzity! Finanzity is a web-based fast-action game specially designed to help make learning some economic concepts easier

The Great Stagnation on Kindle

Yes, I agree with Kevin Drum;

The problem with this is that the Kindle sucks at rendering tables and charts. The screen cap on the right, for example, shows a chart from Tyler's book. As Kindle charts go, it's actually not too bad. But what's on the X-axis? It appears to start with 1455, and obviously the numbers go up. I get the idea. But the actual details are completely lost. Later in the book there's another table so badly rendered that I can't make it out at all.

In the case of "The Great Stagnation," this isn't too big a deal. I know what the chart above is getting at, and the table at the end is one I've seen before. But other nonfiction books don't fare so well. Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, for example, relies heavily on lots and lots of fairly complex charts and tables, and they're rendered so badly (unreadable graphs, table columns that don't line up, etc.) and placed so haphazardly that they made the book almost impossible to absorb properly. To this day, I'm not sure if my disagreements with his thesis are real, or mere artifacts of the fact that the e-version of the book was really hard to follow. In any case, that was the book that made me give up on the Kindle entirely for nonfiction. Until now.

Though the Kindle sucks in many ways, it is still a great way to get books for someone in a poor developing country.

Book Forum- The Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation;

I’m also persuaded by the median income numbers because they are supported by related measurements of other magnitudes. For example, another way to study economic growth is to look not at median income but at national income, gdp, or gross domestic product, the total production of goods and services. Charles I. Jones, an economist at Stanford University, has “disassembled” American economic growth into component parts, such as increases in capital investment, increases in work hours, increases in research and development, and other factors. Looking at 1950–1993, he found that 80 percent of the growth from that period came from the application of previously discovered ideas, combined with heavy additional investment in education and research, in a manner that cannot be easily repeated for the future. In other words, we’ve been riding off the past. Even more worryingly, he finds that now that we are done exhausting this accumulated stock of benefits, we are discovering new ideas at a speed that will drive a future growth rate of less than one-third of a percent (that’s a rough estimate, not an exact one, but it is consistent with the basic message here). It could be worse yet if the idea-generating countries continue to lose population, as we are seeing in Western Europe and Japan.

We will be discussing about the book for the next few weeks.

Belize Economic Outlook

IMF reviews Belize economy;

Key recommendations. Staff recommended a gradual increase in the primary surplus to 4½ percent of GDP, mainly through wage and pension reforms, to place the public debt on a firm downward path and reduce external financing needs. It also recommended continued actions to strengthen the financial system and welcomed improvements in the monetary policy framework. The authorities broadly agreed with the recommendations, particularly tostrengthen the banking system. They planned to seek consensus on needed fiscal reforms, but noted that, in the near term, social conditions strictly constrained the scope for fiscal consolidation.

The authorities seek to reinvigorate growth prospects and reduce the poverty
rate to 35 percent by 2013. The development plan for 2010–13 focuses on job creation and identifies sources of growth in tourism, agro-industry, and fishing. It rests on five pillars: developing small enterprises; strengthening export trade capacity; enhancing human development; addressing social dislocations and reducing crime; and managing environmental and natural disaster risk. The plan seeks to strengthen competitiveness by addressing infrastructure bottlenecks, high costs of financing, and red tape. It contains investment and social plans that will be assessed and integrated into the multiyear budget and presented to donors later this year.

Advice to a Young Statistician

He had grown up with numbers. “My dad
was a truck driver and salesman and a good
amateur athlete. He kept score for the baseball
leagues and the bowling teams, stuff like that,
and because of that I grew up with numbers
around me. He liked doing math – not puzzles,
just numbers.

“And so I grew up always thinking I was
going to be a mathematician or something like
that. I’d get books out of the library – Maths
for the Million, that kind of thing.” He got a
scholarship to Caltech. “I got a real break there.
That was the first year they offered the scholarship,
and but for that I couldn’t have gone.” It
was evidently a remarkable family: all four of
the Efron siblings became academics. “My dad
gave us this pretty clear picture that we weren’t
suited for heavy work.”..

Bayesian methods are fine, but if you get too far into Bayesian
methods you quit thinking about inference because it all becomes automatic

Statisticians work at two basic levels. They can develop statistical methods, like linear models, or they can prove things about inference properties. The first is the one that makes you wildly popular with
people who use statistics for their work; I like to work at the second level.

In some ways I think that scientists have misled themselves into thinking that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound
to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart. You can narrow down your questions; but enormous sets of data often consist of enormous numbers of small sets of data, none
of which by themselves are enough to solve the thing you are interested in, and they fit together in some complicated way.

-Interview with Brad Efron (Stanford statistics professor)

Tourism Fact of the Day

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According to the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, just 25 million people travelled abroad for holidays in 1950. Today, the figure is more than 800 million, representing an annual growth rate of about 6.5%.

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