Male/Female Ratio for Major Countries

For major countries, the total population and the male/female ratio has been obtained from UN´s: World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision (dated 2013)

Major countries has been somewhat arbitrarily defined as:
- G20 member
- OECD member above 5 million population
- UN member abover 50 million

Graphically depicted this look as follows (red female surplus, blue make surplus):

The corresponding data in table format:

Copper Aluminium Price Ratio

We had looked at the copper to aluminium price ratio earlier and noted that it had reached a historical maximum. Interestingly the price ratio has more or less less stayed above 4 and recently even moved to 4.3 as can be seen in the following graph. The data has been obtained from OFDP (Open Financial Data Project).

Admittedly, this price development has not been in line with our expectations.

Proportional Voting Systems

There are a handful of different proportional voting and allocation systems, specifically

Quota Methods

The Hare Niemayer or Vinton is the largest remainder method, which is sometimes generalized with the use of different quotas:

The largest remainder method requires the numbers of votes for each party to be divided by a quota representing the number of votes required for a seat (i.e. usually the total number of votes cast divided by the number of seats, or some similar formula). The result for each party will usually consist of an integer part plus a fractional remainder. Each party is first allocated a number of seats equal to their integer. This will generally leave some seats unallocated: the parties are then ranked on the basis of the fractional remainders, and the parties with the largest remainders are each allocated one additional seat until all the seats have been allocated. This gives the method its name.

Hare quota (also called Hamilton): votes/seats 

Droop quota: 1+votes/(1+seats)

Hagenbach-Bischoff quota: votes/(1+seats)

Imperiali quota: votes/(2+seats)

The quota-method can also be used in an iterative approach, which mostly yields in the same result. An other alternative is too allocate all unallocated seats to the largest party.

Divisor Methods

The highest quotient and highest averages methods is defined as follows:

The highest averages method requires the number of votes for each party to be divided successively by a series of divisors. This produces a table of quotients, or averages, with a row for each divisor and a column for each party. The n'th seat is allocated to the party whose column contains the n'th largest entry in this table, up to the total number of seats available

The series of devisors are defined as follows (D'Hondt is also called Jefferson in the US and Hagenbach-Bischoff in Switzerland, Sainte-Lague is also called Webster in the US:

Generally D`Hondt (round-down) favours large parties while Adams (round-up) favours smaller parties while Sainte-Lague (artithmetic avergae), Hill Huntington (geometric mean) and Dean (harmonic mean) or generally almost identical in their outcome.

In a future post we will look at the actual implications.

Net International Investment Position (NIIP) 2011

The Net International Investment Position data for 2011 was retrieved from the IMF.

All countries with a (either positive or negative) balance larger than USD 100 billion are shown graphically:

Positive balance countries (data in USD billion). Top 5 are Japan, China, Germany, Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Negative balance countries (data in USD billion). Bottom 5 are United States, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Italy (surprising to see commodity exporters like Australia and Brazil with such negative balances).

Complete table (data in USD billion). The data is not consistent in itself as the total is about USD 1.5 trillion negative (a number of countries have no data but it is highly unlikely that they would add USD 1.5 trillion).



PS Chile has a balance of negative 24 billion.

Employment Population Ratio 15-64 for OECD and BRICS countries

We have retrieved the employment participation rate from the OECD site and plotted the following five graphs:

• Ranking of countries (all OECD countries with more than 5 million population plus BRICS) by total employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by male employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Ranking of countries by difference of male to female employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) in 2011
• Change of employment to population rate (15-64 age cohort) between 2011 and 2001 (data for India is not available)

Large (more than 50 million population) OECD countries are colored green, medium (5 to 50 million population) blue and BRICS countries red. Countries are shown with their two digit ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.

Top 3: Switzerland, China, Netherlands

Bottom 3: South Africa, Turkey, India

Top 3: Switzerland, China, Japan

Bottom 3: South Africa, Hungary, Spain

Top 3: Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark

Bottom 3: Turkey, India, South Africa

Top 3: Finland, Sweden, Denmark

Bottom 3: India, Turkey, Mexico

Top 3: Chile, Germany, Poland

Bottom 3: US, Portugal, China

Surprises:

• Switzerland with highest employment to population to population ratios by a wide margin also for females
• Hardly any change in terms of employment to population ratio in Greece or Spain during the last ten years

From Chile´s perspective it is nice to see big improvement in the last ten year, but still much to be done with current ranked in the third quartile in terms of male employment and bottom quartile regarding female employment.

Finally a word of caution: employment data is normally survey based and significant differences with other data sources (say social security) are likely.

Business English

Following a blog post in the Economist, I stumbled across another post from the same publication and finally came across an EF publication which compares English proficiency across many countries. Results are in line with expectation with Scandinavia ranked very high (including the Dutch as honorary Scandinavians) and Central Eastern Europe as high (including also Singapore and Malaysia). Chile is not doing very well, I must say, with very low English proficiency (ranked 39 out of 54).

Copper Price Forecasting (2013 Update)

In a 2012 post we looked at the copper price forecasts of Cochilco since 2005. To do so we looked at the "Informe Trmestral del Mercado de Cobre" which is published on a quarterly basis.

The following graph shows the development of the forecasted copper price (or rather the deviation from the ex-post price) as a function of the number of days before the end of the period for which the forecast was made.

Separately we show an update of the graph we already showed in last year´s post comparing the deviation of the forecasted price made 18 months before the end of the forecasted period with the spot price at the forecasting date.

2012 was a relatively good year with a relatively small forecasting error, undoubtedely assited by relatively low volatility of copper price and the absence of large price movements

Metal and Ore Exports (as a percentage of exports) 1988 to 2010

The Worldbank has nifty page allowing to plot numerous trade related data points:

The World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) is a software developed by the world Bank, in close collaboration and consultation with various International Organizations including United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), International Trade Center (ITC), United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD) and World Trade Organization (WTO). WITS gives you access to major international trade, tariffs and non-tariff data compilations:

• The UN COMTRADE database maintained by the UNSD: Exports and imports by detailed commodity and partner country
• The TRAINS maintained by the UNCTAD: Imports, Tariffs, Para-Tariffs & Non-Tariff Measures at national tariff level
• The IDB and CTS databases maintained by the WTO: MFN Applied, Preferential & Bound Tariffs at national tariff level

WITS is a data consultation and extraction software with simulation capabilities. WITS is a free software. However, access to databases themselves can be fee-charging or limited depending on your status. WITS is a system that is still evolving and we will be adding more features. In subsequent releases of WITS we plan to provide additional features including coupling with ITC's MACMAP system.

We used WITS to plot the share of metals and ore exports as a percentage of total exports for the ten largest copper exporters. Zambia followed by Chile and Peru lead this metric through the whole period (1988 to 2010).

Earliest National Day Celebration Events

In case you ever wanted to know which countries celebrate the earliest events in their national holiday, here is a list for those countries commemorating events which occurred before 1800 (source mostly Wikipedia).

Year	Country	Celebrated Event
660 BC	Japan	Coronation Day First Emperor Jimmu
301	San Marino	Independence from the Roman Empire
461	Ireland	Death of St. Patrick
1291	Switzerland	Alliance against the Holy Roman Empire
1492	Spain	Columbus Discovers America
1523	Sweden	Election of Gustav Vasa as King of Sweden
1580	Portugal	Death of National Poet Luís de Camões
1776	United States	Declaration of Independence from Great Britain
1788	Australia	Founding of Sydney
1789	France	Storming of the Bastille
1791	Poland	Constitution of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

The list does not include sub-national territories where Scotland (70), England (303), Wales (589), Faroe Islands (1030), Minorca (1287), Catalonia (1714) and Sardinia (1794) also celebrate events before 1800.

Apologies if I have missed any event in the above list.

Chilean Lottery (Polla) Numbers for 2011

We looked at the financial numbers for 2011 and 2010 for Polla Chilena, one of the two official lotteries in Chile.

The basic numbers look as follows (in thousand CLP):

* Lottery Revenues can be categorized in the various games as follows (most of the revenues are from traditional lotto):

** From the Payouts there is a 2% fee going to the Handling Agent and a 15% tax on lottery winnings.

*** The Various Beneficiaries are detailed as follows

This gives the following overview on where the revenues go (handling agent fee added to administration cost, all taxes and state beneficiary summed up):

The following comments can be made when comparing these metrics to other lotteries:

• low winner payout (typically in the 40-50% range)
• high administration cost (normally less than 10%)
• high take by the state (normally less than 20%, if that)
• very low distribution to good causes (even when including the amount given to the "Instituto Nacional del Deporte", normally above 30%)

Reader comments as always welcome.