SICENTER Socio-economic Indicators Center

SICENTER (Socio-economic Indicators Center) is a private non-profit research institution registered with the Ministry of Science and Technology in Slovenia. Its main focus of activities is research and consultancy in the field of analysis of economic and social indicators at various levels of aggregation, with application in economics, politics, business and statistics. In empirical research and decision making the art of handling and understanding of different views of data is crucial for discovering the relevant patterns. A novel conceptual and analytical approach in integrating comparisons across time and space has been developed. It offers a new view in comparative analysis in many fields, providing a novel statistical measure, and a concept of multidimensional comparison and evaluation that introduces new possibilities for presentation, visualization and semantics. The new statistical measure, time distance (expressed in units of time), has been generalised to complement conventional measures in time series comparisons, regressions, models, forecasting and monitoring, and to provide from existing data new insights due to an added dimension of analysis. Time distance concept is theoretically universal, intuitively understandable and immanently practical. It has two great advantages: it offers a new view of data that is exceptionally easy to understand and communicate, and it may allow for developing and exploring new hypotheses and perspectives that cannot be adequately dealt without the new concept. Potential users such as governments, international organizations, banks, consultancy organisations, and companies may be interested in the additional insight from existing data provided by the time distance. The obvious applications to business problems are benchmarking, gap analysis, scenarios, and monitoring. Recent applications in studies and papers deal with cohesion in the EU (for DG XVI), time distances between actual and estimated values in regressions (for National Bank of Slovenia), disparities between countries, regions, social and economic groups (for Strategy of Economic Development of Slovenia), and a number of papers for international conferences.