Econometric Modeling

Este artículo presenta una revisión bibliográfica acerca de los métodos que se han utilizado en las últimas dos décadas para predecir Índices Bursátiles. Los métodos estudiados van desde aquellos que logran capturar las características lineales presentes en los índices de bolsa, pasando por los que se enfocan en las características no lineales y finalmente métodos híbridos que son más robustos, pues capturan características lineales y no lineales. Además, se incluyen aquellos métodos que utilizan variables macroeconómicas para predecir los índices de diferentes Bolsas de Valores en el mundo.

Este artículo presenta una revisión bibliográfica acerca de los métodos que se han utilizado en las últimas dos décadas para predecir Índices Bursátiles. Los métodos estudiados van desde aquellos que logran capturar las características lineales presentes en los índices de bolsa, pasando por los que se enfocan en las características no lineales y finalmente métodos híbridos que son más robustos, pues capturan características lineales y no lineales. Además, se incluyen aquellos métodos que utilizan variables macroeconómicas para predecir los índices de diferentes Bolsas de Valores en el mundo.

Econometric models, in the estimation of real estate prices, are a useful and realistic approach for buyers and for local and fiscal authorities. From the classical hedonic models to more data driven procedures, based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), many papers have appeared in economic literature trying to compare the results attained with both approaches. We insist on the use of ANN, when there is enough statistical information, and will detail some comparisons to hedonic modeling, in a medium size city in the South of Spain, with an extensive set of data spanning over several years, collected before the actual downturn of the market. Exogenous variables include each dwelling's external and internal data (both numerical and qualitative), and data from the building in which it is located and its surroundings. Alternative models are estimated for several time intervals, and enabling the comparison of the effects of the rising prices during the bull market over the last deca...

This paper spins off from the work of Rufino (2010) regarding forecasting Philippine monthly inflation using sophisticated expert systems. As we subscribe to the primordial goal of forecasting inflation with remarkable accuracy, this paper seeks to provide a more accurate conjecture process. Employing a comprehensive set of forecasting techniques, we used the more complete time series data from 1958-2011 for three sets of inflation data published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas: National, Metro Manila, and Areas outside Metro Manila (AOMM). Analysis of data revealed that there is no seasonality among the inflation data among these sets. In addition, the ARIMA-based methodology is identified to be the optimal forecasting tool among the methodologies employed. Efforts have to be exerted to identify the best forecasting methodology to forecast inflation towards achieving the goal of price stability through the inflation targeting framework adopted by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

Econometric models, in the estimation of real estate prices, are a useful and realistic approach for buyers and for local and fiscal authorities. From the cIassical hedonic models to more data driven procedures, based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), many papers have appeared in economic literature trymg to compare the results attamed wlth both approaches. We insist on the use of ANN, when there is enough statistical information, and will detail sorne comparisons to hedonic modelling, in a medium size city in the South of Spain, with an extensive set of data spanning over several years, coIlected before the actual downturn of the market. Exogenous variables include each dwelling's external and internal data (both numerical and qualitative), and data from the building in which it is located and its surroundings. AI­ ternative models are estimated for several time intervals, and enabling the comparison of the ettects of the rising prices during the buIl market over the lasi de...

The main objective of this article is to generate a complex network from the data of volatility spillovers among agricultural commodities (cotton, arabic coffee, sugar, soy, wheat, oats, maize and rice) and energy commodities (natural gas and crude oil). We use the spillovers indices developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012). We also calculated the complex network' statistics and analyzed the Force Atlas 2 layout algorithm. The results show that there is a concentration in the main cluster and that there are also two cycles. The main cluster is denser and has thicker (heavier) edges, reflecting the most relevant volatility transmissions between corn, wheat, soybeans, oats and rice. In the two cycles, with thinner edges than those of the main cluster, are the oil-gas and coffee-sugar binomials. Cotton is the only asset that does not belong to both cycles or to the main cluster. But even so, statistics show that it transmits and receives volatility from that cluster (especially from rice, whose edges are a little thicker).

Israeli security measures, which were increased in response to the Intifada in 2000, have imposed a major cost on the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, and are heavily undercutting its current and future developmental capacity. The closures regime - the multi-faceted system of restrictions on the movement of goods and people both within the West Bank and Gaza and through Israel to the rest of the world - along with construction of the “Separation Barrier” have fragmented the West Bank’s and Gaza’s economic space, and have further reduced their productive potential. The aim of this paper is to estimate the economic costs of the closures regime on the Palestinian economy.

This is a book about global communication and equity. It comes as the world of media and communication has drastically changed.  The fundamental issues and structures behind digital media remain basically the same as they have been over the past 50 years. Also the communication problems and policy questions raised since the 1970s at the United Nations have not lost their overall relevance, while new perspectives emerged in moving from the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

The main issue of the media world is to which extent the resources for communication – both material and mental – are distributed in a fair and equal way between nations and people. New technologies have brought along many new possibilities, but their potential has far from materialized due to social and economic structures. While “imbalance” as the overall theme since the 1970s has been replaced by “digital divide” in the 2010s, the fundamental question is still equity.

The book begins by offering a broad overview of communication by two eminent scholars. Johan Galtung’s presentation of the triangle State-Capital-Civil Society is a classic in the study of media and society. Majid Tehranian’s examination of communication and democracy suggests an exceptionally powerful historical and visionary perspective.

The rest of the chapters are either updated from the first edition or new chapters that provide up-to-the-moment appraisals of some of the most important socioeconomic and political issues that affect the world of communication currently.

The Appendix provides a complete record of the eleven MacBride Round Tables that were held between 1989 and 1999, a strategic move to carry on the idea of the NWICO in the ecumenical spirit of democratization of communication as advocated by the MacBride Report Many Voices, One World (1980).

This book is meant for the students and scholars of international communication and development, political economy and international relations. It is also a resource for members of governments and NGOs, as well as advocates of human rights and grassroots communication.


PART I
GLOBAL VISIONS

Johan Galtung, the scholar who first introduced the concept of news structure, and then later helped pioneer the notion of center and periphery in international communication and political economy, offers a seminal chapter which argues that all modern societies are built on three pillars: State, Capital and Civil Society. While there has always been communication between State and Civil Society, though often weak and tenuous, the economic sphere seems a law unto itself. There are few communication channels between State and Capital, and none at all between Capital and Civil
Society's condition causing frustration and repression.

The new world disorder is the subject of Majid Tehranian's chapter. A political economist and global communication scholar, Tehranian critiques discourses on the new world order and analyzes the global changes taking place, and their implications for communication and democratization. The chapter offers both historical and visionary insights. All indicators point to the need to strengthen, through dialogue and new means of self-expression, democratic diversity and cultural pluralism of two-thirds of humankind
which hitherto have been objects rather than subjects of history. 

Both of these chapters appeared in the first edition of this book but here they are reproduced as shorter versions.

PART II
MacBRIDE MOVEMENT

The second section is directly devoted to the MacBride movement itself.

Kaarle Nordenstreng, a scholar and activist in the NWICO movement from its beginning, reviews the great media debate, the context of the movement from the important years of the early 1970s on. This chapter is reproduced from the first edition of this book and is updated to cover the developments to the new millennium.

Mustapha Masmoudi, Tunisia’s former Minister of Information, who hosted the 1976 Non-Aligned Symposium on Information where the concept of NWICO was created, sat on the Unesco MacBride Commission in the late 1970s and wrote before his death in 2013 a review of MacBride
Report objectives with parallels to the more recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). His testimony was not included in the first edition.

PART III
PROSPECTIVES AND PERSPECTIVES

The third section takes up some strands in the rope that ties us to the future. Focusing on journalism, Dennis Davis identifies a new role for journalism in postmodern societies, namely, to construct and share culture and provide a bridge between different cultures.

Development journalism is then taken up by Hemant Shaw, who proposes a normative model that would foster emancipation from modernization. These two are edited versions of respective chapters in the first edition.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter finally reviews the history of transborder communication in an original chapter As a member of WGIG and the UN IGF Improvement Working Group I, this chapter offers a some unique perspectives from an Internet governance insider. Kleinwächter also comments on various events and perspectives regarding the continuing leadership debate on the Internet.

PART IV
MACBRIDE LEGACY

The final section of original chapters is devoted to exploring the MacBride legacy as it relates to the present communication milieu. Katharine Sarikakis begins by examining the trajectory of political claims expressed in the
MacBride Report to the current politics of governance of culture, media and communications. She discusses the role of new trans/urban geographies of production/consumption in the construction of communicative landscapes as they are linked to new priorities in global media policy making.

Robin Mansell focuses on Network Neutrality and the nature of Internets, both public and private in the Post-MacBride Era. She calls on the principles of Civil Society to study the social, political and economic implications of a private Internet. She concludes that justice cannot be
achieved if a growing proportion of online activities is “hidden” from public view and participation.

As a capstone chapter, Richard Vincent uses the concept of Justice and examines the evolution of the MacBride movement, the realities of a global governance system of trade agreements and intellectual property laws. A
major conclusion of this chapter is that any hope that Civil Society might play a dominant role in the WSIS process was dashed as it became obvious that most Civil Society agenda items had ultimately become marginalized and the future for many MacBride-inspired principles was uncertain at best.

Este artículo presenta una revisión bibliográfica acerca de los métodos que se han utilizado en las últimas dos décadas para predecir Índices Bursátiles. Los métodos estudiados van desde aquellos que logran capturar las características lineales presentes en los índices de bolsa, pasando por los que se enfocan en las características no lineales y finalmente métodos híbridos que son más robustos, pues capturan características lineales y no lineales. Además, se incluyen aquellos métodos que utilizan variables macroeconómicas para predecir los índices de diferentes Bolsas de Valores en el mundo.

Este articulo tiene como proposito hacer una estimacion econometrica del modelo de gasto publico y crecimiento economico de Barro (1990). La estimacion se realizo mediante el metodo generalizado de los momentos (GMM) para la economia colombiana durante el periodo 1950-2010. Los resultados obtenidos sugieren que el tamano optimo del gasto publico se sobrepaso al empezar la decada de los noventa. Ademas, se encontro que el tamano del gasto publico que maximiza la tasa de crecimiento del PIB per capita depende inversamente del grado relativo de aversion al riesgo y que la elasticidad de sustitucion intertemporal es baja para el periodo analizado. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Barro (1990) model of public expenditure and economic growth. Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) Estimation was used to examine the Colombian economy during the period 1950-2010. The results suggest that, starting in the early 1990s, the optimal size of public expenditure was exceeded. Furthermore,...

We develop a medium-sized annual macroeconometric model of the Italian economy. The theoretical framework is the usual AS/AD model, where the demand side is specified along Keynesian lines, and the supply side adopts a standard neoclassical technology, with Harrod neutral technological progress. The empirical specification consists of 140 equations, of which 29 stochastic, with 55 exogenous variables. The model structure presents some distinct features, among which the disaggregation of the foreign trade block in seven trade partner regions (thus representing the bilateral imports and exports flows in function of the regional GDP and of the bilateral real exchange rates), and the explicit modelling of the impact of labour market reforms on the wage setting mechanism (which explains the shift in the Phillips curve observed over the last two decades). The model is conceived for the analysis of the medium- to long-run developments of the Italian economy, and as such it adopts econometric methods that allow the researcher to quantify the structural long-run parameters. The equation are estimated over a large sample of annual data (1960-2013), using cointegration techniques that take into account the possible presence of structural breaks in the model parameters. The model overall tracking performance is good. We perform some standard policy experiments in order to show the model’s response to usual shocks: an increase in public expenditure, an exchange rate devaluation, a slowdown in world demand, and an increase in oil prices. The shocks are evaluated by ex post simulation and their impact tracked over a five-year span. The dynamic multipliers appear to be consistent with the economic intuition.

The contents of this paper apply to researches in the fields of economics, statistics – physical or life sciences, other social sciences, accounting and finance, business management and mathematics – core and applied. First, I discussed the misconception and the implications thereof, inherent in the conventional practice of entering interest rates as natural or untransformed series in data analysis most especially, regression models. The trends and variabilities of both transformed and untransformed interest rate series were shown to be similar thereby enhancing the likelihood of similar performances in regressions. By extension therefore, the indicated conventional practice unnecessarily and unjustifiably precluded elasticity inference on the coefficients of interest rates and summing up to procedural inefficiency as an independent computation of elasticity became the only available option. Percentages were not the equivalence of percentage changes and thus only series in growth terms hence, percentage changes should be spared log transformation. Secondly, the paper stressed the imperative to avoid unwieldy and theory incongruent expressions in post preliminary data analysis, by flagging the idea that regression models, in particular, of the growth varieties, should as much as practicable, sync with the dictates of modern time series econometrics in the specification of final equations.

While previous studies utilizing P* indicates that the model is better applicable with large countries, the paper argues that the Philippine case should include a foreign gap price. Further work should also focus on estimating more appropriate values of Q* and V*.