Conferences

Papers presented in this session will deal with construction and uses of economic indices and indicators. Such indices and indicators are summaries of complex social and economic processes, usually recorded by data from surveys or administrative registers. Their purpose is to facilitate the communication and digestion of basic and more detailed summaries of the statistics about the economy. Being compact summaries, their definition and construction is bound to involve a great deal of compromise.

Two basic statistical activities are associated with indices and indicators: definition and estimation. The definition is essential for validity, so that the indicator would reflect what it is intended and understood to be for, and would not be contaminated with other factors. Estimation is a task associated with the sampling design, if applicable, and with data processing, and its purpose is to obtain and report a value that is as close as possible to the target.

Indices and indicators are used for comparisons, across countries or other areas, across time (years) or across economic sectors. Validity of the comparisons is an important concern. In principle, such a comparison is valid only when the definition is applied uniformly across the compared factors (years, countries, or the like).