José Parreño Fernández

A study of the competitiveness of the Spanish construction industry

This study has a two-fold objective. First, it sets out to describe the present situation of the Spanish construction industry and its importance for the competitiveness of the national economy. It then goes on to consider the issue of forecasting for this strategically important sector, by considering three time series - total amount of tendering, the consumption of cement and the total number of homes built - and then forecasting by applying the Box-Jenkins methodology. The comparison of ex-post forecasts with the real data for the three variables, provides a way to evaluate the goodness of the models selected for forecasting.

Analysis of expenditure on pharmaceuticals in the Spanish public health system

In Spain, the social security (i.e., the public health system) budget relays on the local administrations of every region. From this budget, a very important amount of money goes to finance, totally or partially and medicines for people. If the administrations do not take this issue seriously, the expenses can be overwhelming. In this paper, a Spanish region called Asturias is analysed in terms of the number of medicines prescribed and charged to the social security system. In particular, two time series are analysed and forecasted: total number of prescriptions to active people and to pensioners. Two well-known methods are used to obtain forecasts: Box–Jenkins (BJ) ARIMA models and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).