Britain has been the destination of choice for immigrants from OECD nations in the past five years, but tiny Belgium is not far behind. Also Germany, where unemployment is now lower than it was before the financial crisis hit in 2008, is a close third choice.

Outflows of population, predictably are largest from countries with the highest unemployment rates, OECD data show.

Relative to its share of global population, Romania is the world’s biggest people-exporter. It has only 0.3 per cent of global population but provides 6.0 per cent of immigrants to OECD countries. Poland is not far behind, with 0.6 per cent of global population that provides 5.3 per cent of immigrants to the OECD.

But for all the UK’s discomfort with immigration, it is certainly punching above its weight when it comes to delivering citizens to other countries. With only 0.9 per cent of global population, it provides 2.1 per cent of OECD immigrants.

The other striking note from the OECD data is that even though India and China are the top exporters of people to the OECD, those flows represent a tiny proportion of each nation’s overall population.

The OECD suggests that may be because countries with large populations, diverse economies and large land masses are more able to accommodate their citizens within their own borders.

George Osborne’s attempt to flatter the official headline measures of the public finances came unstuck on Wednesday after the UK Statistics Authority reprimanded the Office for National Statistics for treating the Treasury’s raid on the Bank of England as equivalent to tax revenues.

Upholding a complaint from the Financial Times about the ONS decision, the statistics watchdog called for a review of the headline measures of public borrowing and debt.

The decision will stop the chancellor from claiming borrowing is lower merely because funds have been moved from one part of the public sector to another, and demonstrates that the UKSA is willing to criticise the statistical work of its own government department as well as ministers.In November, Mr Osborne announced he would repatriate to the Treasury the funds building up under the quantitative easing scheme in the Bank of England arising from interest payments on the debt owned by the bank.

The Treasury hoped this raid would improve headline figures of government borrowing, helping Mr Osborne to meet his fiscal rules and say borrowing was falling, despite the weak economy.

Initially the ONS agreed with the Treasury’s arguments, but this has now been overturned by the UKSA, which said the counter arguments made by the FT were “more persuasive”.

‘Finding government statistics is not easy. Both expert users and occasional users struggle to navigate their way through the multiple places in which statistics are published.’

UK House of Commons public administration select committee report, May 2013

How hard can it be to find a few statistics? And since when is this a matter for a parliamentary committee?You’ve obviously never tried to use the Office for National Statistics website. Try a simple-sounding query – such as what households are currently spending in a week, or retail price inflation for the past 50 years – and you are highly unlikely to get anywhere using the search window. It’s like Google on an acid trip, throwing several thousand random results at you.

It can’t be that hard.

I recently sat down with one of the UK’s finest economic journalists, Evan Davis of the BBC, and we tried to get the results we wanted either through the search window or by trying to second-guess the tormented mind of the person who constructed the branches of the database’s hierarchy. It was hopeless. Even when Mr Davis used his expertise to shortcut the process, we found ourselves thwarted at every turn. (As an aside, Google delivered the correct result in seconds.)

I am sure Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, would not be defeated
so easily.

Perhaps not, but Mr Giles testified to the public administration committee and took the trouble to run through, step by step, just how difficult it would be to find the answer to a simple, practical statistical question – such as whether unemployment today is lower or higher than it was in the mid-1990s. For an expert user, who knows that the relevant code for the data in question is MGSX, finding an answer to that question is slow and awkward. For a more typical user, finding an answer might be impossible.

]]> http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/06/10/a-statistical-needle-in-a-bureaucratic-haystack/feed/ 0 http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/06/07/big-data-and-intelligence-gathering/ http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/06/07/big-data-and-intelligence-gathering/#comments Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:29:20 +0000 Chris Cook http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/?p=69622 The NSA data-collection story has prompted a lot of reporting about “metadata” – information about communications between individuals. As the FT has reported:

The practice was revealed by The Guardian, which published an order – signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – instructing Verizon to give the NSA the metadata, or information logs, for the calls “on an ongoing daily basis”.

Call logs really matter. Even if you cannot hear the calls, metadata – knowing who called whom – is massively important. It allows you to build a picture of who knows whom and how well. This sounds trivially true, but computing power means it’s extremely easy to pull out this data in real time and in great detail. And if you spot a suspicious group, you can then get another warrant to listen in on their conversations.

Here is an example: I’ve put my Facebook account details into a piece of analytical software – and, 10 seconds later, this is my life:

This is a map of who my friends are based solely on knowing which of them is friends of the others. Nothing else. Just Facebook friend lists. It has worked out that the big clusters are groups of people who know one another – so probably have something in common. The ones at the centre of the packs know everyone else around them, and those at the edge are more peripheral.

The NSA data-collection story has prompted a lot of reporting about “metadata” – information about communications between individuals. As the FT has reported:

The practice was revealed by The Guardian, which published an order – signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – instructing Verizon to give the NSA the metadata, or information logs, for the calls “on an ongoing daily basis”.

Call logs really matter. Even if you cannot hear the calls, metadata – knowing who called whom – is massively important. It allows you to build a picture of who knows whom and how well. This sounds trivially true, but computing power means it’s extremely easy to pull out this data in real time and in great detail. And if you spot a suspicious group, you can then get another warrant to listen in on their conversations.

Here is an example: I’ve put my Facebook account details into a piece of analytical software – and, 10 seconds later, this is my life:

This is a map of who my friends are based solely on knowing which of them is friends of the others. Nothing else. Just Facebook friend lists. It has worked out that the big clusters are groups of people who know one another – so probably have something in common. The ones at the centre of the packs know everyone else around them, and those at the edge are more peripheral.

This means more to me than you, but this is an extremely accurate picture of the state of my life about five years ago (which is roughly when I forgot I had a Facebook account).

For those who really care: the orange blobs are university friends, the red blobs are friends from my first job, the yellowy blobs at top left are a mixture of school friends and family (I went to school with some of my cousins). The green blobs at the bottom right are FT friends. And the isolated blobs are, indeed, people who know none of the others.

That’s pretty impressive from nothing more than a list of friends. Now imagine what you could do if you added data on frequency of communication? Who was talking to whom how often? You would quickly pick up who the sub-cliques were in tremendous detail. Computing power has made boring old metadata into a fantastically powerful tool. No wonder governments want it.

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The move is a canny one on China’s part. Although European wine-makers have historically not been favoured by Chinese consumers, that has begun to change. Between 2008 and 2012 Chinese consumption of European wines rocketed by 445 per cent. This is despite the fact that duties and taxes already account for around half the price of the average imported bottle.

Among European producers France dominates the Chinese market, although Spain and Italy have begun to consolidate their toe-hold recently.

In part this reflects a general increase in the Chinese taste for wine – overall wine consumption was up by 126 per cent in the same period. And European wines still only comprise a small share of the total market.

There are now 18.9m drinkers of imported wine in China’s major urban areas alone, according to data from specialist research firm Wine Intelligence. That’s more than the entire population of the Netherlands. The Chinese market for imported wine is worth some $1.6bn a year, according to the UN’s Comtrade database.

The domestic wine-making industry has failed to capitalise on this growth, with Chinese-made wine sales increasing at a slower rate than those of foreign producers.

The reason for this lies in prestige.

Richard Halstead of Wine Intelligence identifies two main types of Chinese buyer. “The first is the traditional consumer, who is purchasing foreign wine for show or face,” he says.

These consumers have historically dominated the market and still account for the lion’s share of spending on imported wine – nearly half. They often choose well-known French bottles such as top-end Bordeaux, Mr Halstead says.

But it’s the second category that is really driving import growth volumes – the emerging young middle class. “We’d call them social newbies. They’re 20 to 30-somethings and are starting to feel their way into wine because it’s part of being an international, modern Chinese person.”

A quarter of all Chinese imported wine drinkers now fall into this category, Wine Intelligence estimates. They choose cheaper bottles and are more adventurous about origin, branching out into Italian and Spanish brands but also developing a taste for New World products. As a result, Australian wines are now the second-biggest imports by volume:

That’s what’s behind the diversification of Chinese wine imports. And these aspiring young oenophiles’ catholic taste offers reassurance to their politicians that taxing European wines wouldn’t provoke a popular backlash.

We can hear Australia’s chardonnay growers cheering from here.

Edit: A belated amendment: Richard points out that 90 per cent of the imported wine consumed in China is red. So it’s more likely to be Aussie shiraz growers who are cheering.

Much of this economic momentum comes from big economies that are expanding relatively slowly. But who, in pure year-on-year percentage growth terms, is leading the pack this year?

The main conclusion we can draw from the fastest-growing* economies of 2013 is that the best conditions for an economic surge come when a relatively small economy emerges from a war. Probably not a useful tip for most countries’ finance ministers, but we offer it up anyway.

source: IMF

The exceptions in this table are Mongolia, Paraguay, Panama, Gambia and Mozambique. In most cases, these countries’ growth stories revolve around their possession of natural resources – and, in one case, a transport hub:

• Mongolia benefits from its proximity to China, and its natural resources.
• Paraguay has achieved greater political stability after a presidential impeachment.
• Panama’s expanding canal is just one part of its rapid growth, with multinationals favouring the country as a regional base.
• Gambia is beginning to open up to foreign countries interested in offshore oil exploration.
• Mozambique has large coal and gas resources and is increasingly being targeted by luxury goods manufacturers as its middle class evolves.

So, the moral of 2013′s global growth story is – for world-leading growth, you’ll need to either bounce back from conflict, or have vast natural resources.

Or build a canal.

* One caveat: many developing nations’ economic statistics are not necessarily the most reliable. That could quite possibly include some of these in our list. Our data comes from the IMF, who probably have about as much of an idea as anyone.

Nearly a quarter of European under-25s are now unemployed, the latest reported figures show. And concerns reached a new pitch last week when it was revealed that Italian youth unemployment had topped 40 per cent.

But are these figures really all they are cracked up to be?

My colleague James Mackintosh was spot-on when he Tweeted last week that youth unemployment figures are meaningless without understanding what proportion of a country’s young people are economically active. This vital bit of information leads to quite a different picture on youth unemployment across Europe.

The point was also well-made last year by Alan Beattie – but it’s worth re-visiting.

Here are the raw unemployment rates, as you might see reported in some places:

They look pretty bad, right? Over 50 per cent in Greece and Spain, 40 per cent in Italy and Portugal.

But wait a minute. Unemployment figures only reflect the proportion of the population who are economically active – ie. looking for a job, but unable to find one.

Among young people in particular, inactivity rates can be expected to be very high – many are in either education or training.

What do the figures look like if we take into account the economically inactive population?

Far less bad, actually, even with the caveat that some individuals will go into training or education because of the lack of jobs.

So, are nearly a quarter of European young people unemployed?

No. Fewer than 10 per cent are.

Chinese meat processing firm Shuanghui is aiming to buy Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer. The deal is being driven by Chinese consumers’ soaring demand for wonton dumplings, char sui noodles and other delicious pork-based dishes.

Here is why the deal adds up for Shuanghui in nine charts:

1. China is now by far the world’s largest market for pork:

2. And pork is by far the most popular meat in China:

3. Chinese consumers’ love of pork overtook that of the USA quite a while ago:

4. Rising consumption of pork is closely tied to the growth of the Chinese middle class – pork consumption increases noticeably along with income:

5. This soaring demand has fuelled a steady growth in global pork production in the past three decades – and with demand outpacing supply in the past couple of years, prices have begun to spike:

6. China’s pork farmers have responded by consolidating rapidly, which may help to smooth out price fluctuations:

7. But China’s domestic pork production is woefully inadequate. Repeated food safety scandals have damaged consumers’ confidence in home-grown produce. The major domestic pork producers have seen their profits fall:

8. That’s despite receiving considerable government subsidy:

9. As a consequence, China is increasingly reliant on meat imports:

This leaves China particularly vulnerable to food price inflation, which is forecast to steam ahead in the coming months.

The Shuanghui/Smithfield purchase brings a large slice of the world’s pork supply into Chinese hands – and straight to the chopsticks of hungry consumers.

No wonder the deal looks so tasty.

But that might be about to change.

London has evolved into a global city-state of over 25m people that is more comparable to Hong Kong or Singapore than the rest of the UK or Europe, according to new property market research.

Although just 9m people live within London’s official boundary, the city’s housing market comprises a much wider swath of territory stretching across England from the River Severn to the Wash, the data analysis by estate agency Savills shows.

House price movements across large parts of southern England are very closely correlated with price movements in the London market, Savills found. This reflects the influence of both London commuters seeking cheaper housing, and people relocating from London who affect local housing demand and pricing.

Image courtesy of Savills. The shading reflects local house prices’ correlation to London. Bright red = over 95%. Mid-red = over 90%. Light red = over 80%.

The total population covered by this swath of territory is comparable to that of Tokyo or Delhi, and far exceeds the size of any metropolitan area in Europe. It would make London the world’s second-largest urban agglomeration, according to the UN’s World Urbanisation Prospects study. Only Tokyo exceeds it in size – and London is growing faster.

Savills director of residential research Yolande Barnes said: “We have known for a long time that London’s economy is very different from the rest of the UK, and property markets outside of London behave in a similar way to London and are driven by many of the same factors.

“London’s city-state extends over most of southern England, south of a line from the Severn to the Wash. Only the most peripheral and rural counties of Devon, Cornwall and Norfolk are excluded.”