The book showcases a selection of peer-reviewed papers, the preliminary versions of which were presented at a conference held 11-13 June 2011 in Bologna and organized jointly by the Italian Statistical Society (SIS), the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the Bank of Italy. The theme of the conference was "Statistics in the 150 years of the Unification of Italy."

The celebration of the anniversary of Italian unification provided the opportunity to examine and discuss the methodological aspects and applications from a historical perspective and both from a national and international point of view. The critical discussion on the issues of the past has made it possible to focus on recent advances, considering the studies of socio-economic and demographic changes in European countries.

Auteur

Fabio Crescenzi is an expert highly skilled in issues related to survey methodology. He works at the National Institute of Statistics as head of the Office for statistical methods in the Department of Census and registers.

Stefania Mignani is a Full Professor of Statistics at University of Bologna. Her research interests focus on methodological developments in latent variable models and applications in educational and behaviour studies.

Contenu
Part I - Methodological Issues in an Historical Perspective: Bayesian and non-bayesian approaches to statistical inference: a personal view, by Bruno Chiandotto.- Contributions of Italian statisticians to the development of multivariate data analysis, by Renato Coppi and Paolo Giordani.- The Semantic role of variability in the development of statistical thought, by Paola Monari.- The Permutation Testing Approach in the Light of Conditionality and Sufficiency Principles, by Fortunato Pesarin.- Bayesian Statistical Inference: an Overview, by Ludovico Piccinato.- Part II - Historical Issues in Economic and Socio-Demographic Studies: The long journey of Italian statistics on international migration, by Corrado Bonifazi.- The Evolution of Statistic Information on Agricultural Labour Force through Italian Agricultural Censuses from 1961 to 2010, by Loredana De Gaetano.- Changes in the Geographical Distribution of Inhabitants in Tuscany since 1861, by Luca Faustini, Linda Porciani, Graziella Sanna, Cristiano Tessitore, and Alessandro Valentini.- The Administrative Territory From the Unity of Italy to the Present - An Overview through the History of Municipalities and Provinces, by Orietta Gargano and Tiziana Clary.- Fifty Years of Business Confidence Surveys on Manufacturing Sector, by Bianca M. Martelli, Giancarlo Bruno, Paola M. Chiodini, Giancarlo Manzi, and Flavio Verrecchia.- Part III - New Developments in Survey Methodology for Official Statistics: Social aspects on censuses and official surveys in Italy, by Enrica Aureli and Mariangela Verrascina.- Response Burden Reduction through the Use of Administrative Data and Robust Sampling, by Maria Caterina Bramati.- An Application of Text Mining Technique for the Census of Nonprofit Institutions, by D. F. Iezzi, M. Lori, F. Lorenzini, M. Nicosia, S.Stoppiello.- Linking Administrative Tax Records and Survey Expenditure Data at the Local Level, by Lisa Crosato, Mauro Mussini, Paolo Mariani and Biancamaria Zavanella.- An Application of Statistical Matching Techniques to Produce a New Microeconomic Dataset on Farming households' Institutional Sector in Italy, by Edoardo Pizzoli, Benedetto Rocchi, and Giuseppe Sacco.- Outlier Detection via Compositional Forward Search: Application to the Preliminary Data of the 2010 Italian Agricultural Census, by Simona Toti, Filippo Palombi, and Romina Filippini.- Innovative Approaches to Census-taking: Overview of the 2011 Census Round in Europe, by Paolo Valente.- Part IV - New Methodological Developments in Economic Studies: Measuring Multidimensional Inequality: Methods and Issues in Empirical Analysis, by David Aristei and Bruno Bracalente.- Turning the Compulsory Communication Data into a Statistical System, by C. Baldi, G. De Blasio, G. Di Bella, A. Lucarelli, and R. Rizzi.- Credit Stress Testing From a Portfolio Perspective, by Tiziano Bellini.- Remote Processing of Business Microdata at the Bank of Italy, by Giuseppe Bruno, Leandro D'Aurizio, and Raffaele Tartaglia-Polcini.- A Distributional Approach for Measuring wage Discrimination and Occupational Discrimination Separately, by R. Giaimo, and G. L. Lo Magno.- Statistics and Economics: A Complex Relationship, by Alessandro Roncaglia.- Part V - New Methodological Developments in Educational Studies: Design, Implementation and Validation of a Questionnaire for University Teaching Evaluation, by Luigi D'Ambra and Maurizio Carpita.- A Family of Indices for Teaching Evaluation - Experiences in Italian Universities, by Donata Marasini and Piero Quatto.- The Unity of Italy From the Point of View of Student Performances: Evidences from PISA 2009, by Mariagiulia Matteucci and Marilena Pillati.- Some Experimental Results on the Role of Speed and Accuracy of Reading in Psychometric Tests, by IsabellaMorlini, Giacomo Stella, and Maristella Scorza.- A Propensity Score Matching Method to Study the Achievement of Students in Upper Secondary Schools, by Giulia Roli and Luisa Stracqualursi.- Part VI - New Methodological Developments in Social and Demographic Studies: Developing a Composite Indicator of Residents' well-being: the Case of the Romagna Area, by Cristina Bernini, Andrea Guizzardi, and Giovanni Angelini.- New Technologies and Statistics Partners for Environmental Monitoring and City Sensing, by Rina Camporese, Giovanni Borga, Niccolò Iandelli, and Antonella Ragnoli.- Recent Developments in Multidimensional Analysis for Customer Satisfaction, by Luigi D'Ambra and Enrico Ciavolino.- Tourism Statistics for Destination Management: The Trips/Arrivals model, by Stefano De Cantis, Mauro Ferrante.- Non-Compensatory Aggregation of Social Indicators: An Icon Representation, by Matteo Mazziotta and Adriano Pareto.- Indicators for Assessment in Health Services, by Cesare Cislaghi and Marco Marchi.- Measuring the multidimensional demographic conv...