Stefan Humer

Democracy, Geography and Model Uncertainty

We analyse the nature of robust determinants of differences in democracy levels across countries taking explicitly into account uncertainty in the choice of covariates and spatial spillovers. We make use of recent developments in Bayesian model averaging to assess the effect of a large number of potential factors affecting democratisation processes and account for several specifications of spatial linkages. Our results indicate that spatial spillovers are present in the data even after controlling for a large number of geographical covariates. Addressing the determinants of democracy without modelling such spillovers may lead to flawed inference about the nature of the determinants of democratisation processes. In particular, our results emphasise the role played by Muslim religion, population size, trade volumes, English language, natural resource rents, GDP per capita, being a MENA country and the incidence of armed conflicts as factors affecting democracy robustly.

Quality Assessment of Imputations in Administrative Data

Abstract This article contributes a framework for the quality assessment of imputations within a broader structure to evaluate the quality of register-based data. Four quality-related hyperdimensions examine the data processing from the raw-data level to the final statistics. Our focus lies on the quality assessment of different imputation steps and their influence on overall data quality. We suggest classification rates as a measure of accuracy of imputation and derive several computational approaches.

Projecting Long-Term Primary Energy Consumption

In this paper we use the long-term empirical relationship among primary energy consumption, real income, physical capital, population and technology, obtained by averaged panel error correction models, to project the long-term primary energy consumption of 56 countries up to 2100. In forecasting long-term primary energy consumption, we work with four different Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Scenarios (SSPs) developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) framework, assuming different challenges to adaptation and mitigation. We find that in all scenarios, China, the United States and India will be the largest energy consumers, while highly growing countries will also significantly contribute to energy use. We observe for most scenarios a sharp increase in global energy consumption, followed by a levelling-out and a decrease towards the second half of the century. The reasons behind this pattern are not only slower population growth, but also infrastructure saturation and increased total factor productivity. This means, as countries move towards more knowledge based societies, and higher energy efficiency, their primary energy usage is likely to decrease as a result. Global primary energy consumption is expected however to increase significantly in the coming decades, thus increasing the pressure on policy makers to cope with the questions of energy security and greenhouse gas mitigation at the same time.