Economic statistics and economic problems

The purpose of this book is to show how available statistical material can be used to investigate and cast light on economic problems, rather than to teach formal statistical methods for economists, or describe or discuss sources of economic statistics. It seeks to interest students in quantitative, applied economic work by showing them how economic statisticians tackle different types of problems. I believe that some training on these lines should be included in the syllabuses of all students reading for honours degrees in economics, and not regarded as forming the exclusive province of the specialist economic statistician or econometrician. No student, however keen his interest in theoretical economics, can regard his training as complete unless he has acquired some knowledge of how to examine real-life problems from published statistical data.

It is, then, for economics students who are not specialist statis ticians or potential econometricians that I have written this book. I have assumed as background only the subject matter traditionally covered in general first-year courses in economic statistics: arith metic and logarithmic scale graphs, frequency distributions, averages and measures of dispersion, elementary treatment of index numbers and analysis of time-series, correlation and regression analysis with two variables, and some knowledge of sources. When using regression estimates, I have kept deliberately to the two variable model, though a partial correlation coefficient is quoted in chapter 6, and a multiple correlation coefficient in chapter 7. Chapter 10, however, deals with what are essentially multi-variate problems. If I were writing for more sophisticated statisticians, I would have treated some matters differently; indeed, one would have written a different sort of book, but such treatment would take the present book out of the range of the readers for whom I intend it.