Introduction to Quarto and Zotero

Author

Dr. Ghita Berrada 

import pandas as pd
from plotnine import ggplot, aes, geom_bar, labs, scale_fill_discrete, element_text, xlab, ylab
from plotnine.coords import coord_flip
from plotnine.themes import theme, theme_bw

df = pd.read_csv("OECD_GDP_dataset_1972_2022.csv")

def avg_gdp_per_year(data,year):
   return data.query('TIME==@year')['Value'].mean()

Understanding missing data mechanisms

There are various reasons for data to be missing:

  • according to Donald Rubin (Rubin 1976), data values can be Missing Completely at Random (MCAR) i.e the missingness of these values follows a totally random pattern and there isn’t anything in the data driving it that you need to be further concerned with (this is the best case scenario and can be dealt with with rather simplistic methods)
  • data values can also follow the Missing at Random (MAR) mechanism. In this case, the missingness depends on other variables observed in the data you you collected but not on unseen data and not on the variable that is missing data itself.
  • Finally, if the missing values depend on unobserved data and/or the variable with missing values itself, then we have a case of Not Missing At Random (MNAR) Mechanism.

Data Analysis Case Study: GDP (OECD data)

GDP table for selected countries

GDP per capita for selected countries between 2018 and 2020
Country 2018 2019 2020
United Kingdom 47 108 49 220 45 757
India 6 799 7 104 6 644
China 15 466 16 625 17 177
Spain 40 777 43 136 38 031
United States 62 450 64 690 63 481
Italy 43 428 45 800 43 150
France 46 337 50 227 47 982

GDP barplot for selected countries

Criticism of the GDP measure

GDP is heavily criticized as measure of economic welfare (Kapoor and Debroy 2019; Coyle 2017). It is not an appropriate or good measure of human well-being and fails to capture the distribution of income across society. It is overly focused on measuring production outputs in economies where services play an increasingly larger role. Unpaid work, though clearly contributing to economies in myriads of ways, is not measured by it. Nor does it concern itself with the environmental cost or externalities of the measured economic outputs.

Image source:(Nast 2023)

References

Coyle, Diane. 2017. “Rethinking GDP.” Finance & Development 54 (1). https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/03/coyle.htm.
Kapoor, Amit, and Bibek Debroy. 2019. “GDP Is Not a Measure of Human Well-Being.” Harvard Business Review, October. https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-being.
Nast, Condé. 2023. “Sorry, GDP. There Are Other Ways to Measure a Nation’s Worth.” Wired UK, January. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/happiness-measurement-humanity.
Rubin, Donald B. 1976. “Inference and Missing Data.” Biometrika 63 (3): 581–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/63.3.581.