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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate differences between 46 countries, 25 of which are EU members, in their technological communication standards and technological efforts.Design/methodology/approachTwo indexes were developed. The first, labeled Index 1, measures the communication standards of the 46 countries. The second index, labeled Index 2, measures their innovative efforts. Three different dimension variables were employed in each index. Analysis of variance and the coefficient of variation were used to find similarities and differences between and within the groups classified as EU and non‐EU.FindingsResults show overall that there were no statistically significant differences in means when countries were grouped into EU and non‐EU.Originality/valueThe paper uses two indexes composed of indication variables to rate and rank 46 countries for their technological diffusion, considering communication standards and innovative efforts.

Purpose – ISO 9001 certification is nowadays considered to be one of the most effective tools that can be adopted for guiding the management of Quality Systems. The stunning growth observed by these standards all over the world confirms a strong polarization of enterprises' interest in this practice. Owing to the wide incidence of this phenomenon, a deep investigation of ISO 9001 diffusion over time is of mandatory importance. In the line of our previous publications, this paper derives from a research project that we are conducting in Portugal in order to develop the "ISO 9001 European Scoreboard", aimed at studying and ranking European Union countries based on quality management systems diffusion. Methodology/Approach – In order to achieve such a goal, the authors have performed a set of statistical analyses over public data sets. Findings – Based on the model developed and in the analyses performed we were able to find out clusters of countries with different ISO 9001 evolution stages, derived from the ISO 9001 per 1000 inhabitants' scores and countries growth indexes. Originality – With this scoreboard we are able to categorize and rank countries based on the quality management systems evolution (growth rates) over the past few years. In the end, such an "ISO 9001 European Scoreboard" will be an instrument to provide a comparative assessment of quality management practices over the European Union states, leading to the dynamic evaluation of their "macroquality" levels achieved, according to such a standard. We believe that such results provide an additional important contribution to the study of management systems diffusion/evolution, aimed at providing more fact-based insights and ...

Central banks regularly monitor select financial and macroeconomic variables in order to obtain early indication of the impact of monetary policies. This practice is discussed on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York website, for example, where one particular set of macroeconomic indicators is given. In this paper, we define a particular set of indicators; that is chosen to be representative of the typical sort of variable used in practice by both policy-setters and economic forecasters. As a measure of the adequacy; of the indicators, we compare their predictive content with that of a group of observable factor proxies selected from amongst 132 macroeconomic and financial time series, using the diffusion index methodology of Stock and Watson (2002a,b) and the factor proxy methodology of Bai and Ng (2006a,b) and Armah and Swanson (2010). The variables that we predict are output growth and inflation, two representative variables from our set of indicators that are often discussed when assessing the impact of monetary policy. Interestingly, we find that thc indicators are all contained within the set the observable variables that proxy our factors. Our findings, thus, support the notion that a judiciously chosen set of macroeconomic indicators can effectively provide the same macroeconomic policy-relevant information as that contained in a largescale time series dataset. Of course, the large-scale datasets are still required in order to select the key indicator variables or confirm one's prior choice of key variables. Our findings also suggest that certain yield spreads; are also useful indicators. The particular spreads that we find to be useful are the difference between Treasury or corporate yields and the federal funds rate. After conditioning on these variables, traditional spreads, such as the yield curve slope and the reverse yield gap are found to contain no additional marginal predictive content. We also find that the macroeconomic indicators (not including spreads) perform best when forecasting inflation in non-volatile time periods, while inclusion of our spread variables improves predictive accuracy in times of high volatility.

Over the past three decades, Portugal has developed a strong economic dependence on tourism, which has several implications for the country's overall economic development. Tourism is an activity that is interrelated strongly with the economic system since Portugal as a whole and specific regions in particular rely on the performance of tourism for their economic activity. Moreover, because economic cycles affect tourism development, it is highly vulnerable to economic fluctuations. Most tourists who visit Portugal are from the European Union, especially Western Europe. Statistics are based on the number of overnight stays in hotel accommodation and other similar establishments. In 2005, the main source markets were the UK (30.7%), Germany (16.5%), Spain (11.5%), the Netherlands (6.8%), France (4.7%), Ireland (3.6%) and Italy (3.1%). These values show that the UK has the greatest share of visitors to Algarve. The purpose of this paper is to propose a modelling approach that best fits the tourism flow pattern in order to support forecasting. The paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between economic cycles and tourism flows to Portugal (Algarve) and explores the potential of applying the diffusion index model proposed by Stock and Watson (1999, 2002) for tourism demand forecasting.