Surveys of family budgets, in which the main characteristics of the study are the average income and expenses and the percentage of expenses in several papers or groups, are a practical example of the application of the “Quantitative techniques for regional analysis”, title of the book which has just been published in the University of Granada by professors Federico Palacios González and José Callejón Céspedes, of the Department of Quantitative Methods for Business and Management.
The purpose of these surveys, according to the authors, goes from the analysis of the demand to price index weighting for family saving, as well as for market research. Establishing the market structure allows to know the population by sex, age, socioeconomic class, rural or urban areas; consumers preferences to get to know their habits, needs, tastes, experiences and knowledge about the products on sale; sale techniques, whose object is to get to know or guarantee the launch of new products, motivation and publicity studies; business and establishments surveys to get to know features such as benefits, dividends, salaries, stock, equipments, facilities, etc., as well as opinions on present and future situation; auditing and accountancy or opinion polls, which have become very important for their relation with political, economic and social objectives.
Economic and social purpose
According to Professor of Quantitative Methods for Business and Management of the UGR, Rafael Herrerías Pleguezuelo, due to their tradition in the historical activity of national statistics, “population, housing and farming census, etc., still are object of study and experience with the intention to develop economic and social policies. We can quote, for example, service statistics, particularly the sanitary (number of beds, doctors, etc. of every thousand inhabitants) and educational ones and, recently, statistics connected with the environment.”
This manual published by the University of Granada also includes a careful and summarized collection of exercises solved and proposed that make of this book a basic tool for the learning of Quantitative Techniques.
Among statistical techniques, sampling theory has made one of the most important contributions to Economic and Business Sciences.
“Essentially −the authors say−, sampling problem can be considered as an economic problem in which it is a question of optimizing the ‘information-resources’ pairing. You take a risk when you assert something about a collective from the information obtained from a part of it. The optimum decision involves obtaining such information with a minimum number of accuracy, using minimum resources”. The main objective of Statistics is making inferences about a population from the information contained in a sample. To this extent, in a first stage, Quantitative Techniques describe a whole of measuring carried out on the elements of a sample, build the tables and graphics of frequency distribution and obtain different numeric measurements (of position, dispersion, asymmetry, concentration…) that will allow to deduce a series of facts from such data.
Reference: Prof Federico Palacios González. fpalacio@ugr.es
Prof José Callejón Céspedes
Department of Quantitative Methods for Business and Management. Phone numbers: 958 249 907 (direct) / 958 240 619 (Department Head) E-mail. callejon@ugr.es
