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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Economists and statisticians are gradually amassing new knowledge of economic processes and enlarging the range of data which provide the underpinnings of their craft. Since the end of the Second World War, a number of new statistical tools have been developed for measuring the performance of the economy, and a good deal of new quantitative information on the structure and behaviour of the economic system has been collected. Among these new tools have been developments in the field of social accounting, and new and improved techniques for isolating and studying fluctuations in the business cycle. It is with the latter question that this paper is concerned-the decomposition of time series into their trend-cycle, seasonal, and residual elements. While the work in this field in Canada in the early 1950's was initially focused on measuring cyclical fluctuations in the quarterly national accounts, it has long since evolved a full-fledged life of its own, and a general programme of time series analysis has been under way at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics since 1955. The recent application of electronic computers to the problem is rapidly transforming the entire field.
The present paper has a three-fold aim: to review the rationale of time series analysis; to give an account of the background and status of the work at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics; and to provide a brief outline of the electronic computer programme now in use in this area.
This paper owes a heavy debt to the work and writings of Julius Shiskin, Chief Economic Statistician at the United States Bureau of the Census, under whose leadership the work on time series analysis by electronic computer methods was originally developed; to the work of the National Bureau of Economic Research, whose basic studies of the business cycle have provided economists with a methodological framework and spurred the search for faster and more efficient means of decomposing and analysing time series; and to material prepared for the sessions on seasonal adjustment held in Paris, France, in November-December, 1960, under the joint sponsorship of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and the Conference of European Statisticians. The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors, and should not be construed as necessarily reflecting the official position of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics.
The paper is a shortened version of material prepared for presentation to the June, 1961, meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association in Montreal.
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6 Sponsored by the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and the Conference of European Statisticians. Proceedings will be published later in 1962 by OEEC. Hereafter cited as OEEC Papers.
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14 A sample print-out of the computer programme is available from the authors on request.
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