engleski

Settings of distributive trade growth indicator using factor analysis method

In this paper the first goal is to identify all publicly available statistics such as number of employees, turnover, realized gross value added, value of stock and other data that are commonly used as a benchmark to assess trends in the distributive trade sector. The purpose is to transmute those statistics into a variables and subject them to dimensional reduction using factor analysis to determine which sequences of variables can be taken as the basis in the signaling fluctuations in the sector. On the one hand there is a decrease in the number of shops and businesses entities in the market due to strengthening of the concentration and the occurrence of large stores but on other hand turnover and value of investment are increasing. This raises the question of statistical variable or few variables that may be in this case more or less significant and adequate to identify economic trends. The hypothesis is that the variables analyzed in the paper can be classified into two or three groups within which there are approximately similar correlation features, which can in whole facilitate and assist in investigating the causes of growth or decline of distributive trade activities in national economy. Croatia is nearly at the exit from the crisis, and on the horizon is the next financial and economic crisis in Europe. The importance of research of this problem stems from the great importance of distributive trade sector which belongs to the third place by contributing to GDP. For this reason, closely following developments in this sector as intermediate between production and final consumption it is often taken as an indicator of the economic situation in the country and of the possible emergence of a crisis situation or its mitigation.

distributive trade; growth; statistics; indicators; factor analysis

Međunarodna konferencija, međunarodno uredništvo