Statistical Terms Glossary

Actual quantity of produce, after drying and processing, ready for sale or consumption.

Production is an activity resulting in a product. It is used with reference to the whole range of economic activities. The term is not reserved for the agricultural, mining or manufacturing sectors. It is also used in relation to the service sector. More specific terms may be used to denote production: provision of services, processing, manufacturing, etc., depending on the branch of activity. Production may be measured in various ways either in physical terms or according to value.

Production is an activity carried out under the control and responsibility of an institutional unit that uses inputs of labour, capital, and goods and services to produce outputs of goods or services. There must be an institutional unit that assumes responsibility for the process and owns any goods produced as outputs or is entitled to be paid, or otherwise compensated, for the services provided. A purely natural process without any human involvement or direction is not production in an economic sense.

The production account records the activity of producing goods and services as defined within the SNA; its balancing item, gross value added, is a measure of the contribution to GDP made by an individual producer, industry or sector.

The production boundary includes:

(a) the production of all individual or collective goods or services that are supplied to units other than their producers, or intended to be so supplied, including the production of goods or services used up in the production of goods or services used up in the process of producing such goods or services;

(b) the own-account production of all goods that are retained by their producers for their own final consumption or gross capital formation;

(c) the own-account production of housing services by owner-occupiers and of domestic and personal services produced by employing paid domestic staff.

It represents the energy available to the berths of the ports, which can handle the goods and receive the vessels on them, the actual cargo arriving from the ships to the pier.

The steps that need to be taken in order to transform raw materials into goods which can then be used by consumers.

Process of judging how much production is required to meet estimated sales in a particular forecasting period. Considerations include previous sales, the general state of the economy, consumer preferences, and competitive products. Production forecasting decisions affect budgetary and scheduling decisions.

Production function is the maximum set of output(s) that can be produced with a given set of inputs. Use of a production function implies technical efficiency. Synonym for production frontier, the technically efficiency part of a feasible production set,

Model that considers the biomass of the stock as a whole, that is, it does not take into consideration the age or size structure of the stock. This kind of model is only applied in analyses that consider fishing level changes, as it does not allow the analysis of the effects of changes in the exploitation pattern, on catches and biomasses.

The act of processing large quantities of data after initial “bugs”
have been removed from the edit or tabulation program.

Contract where the contractor makes contributions to the investment project and his remuneration substantially (i.e., not necessarily wholly) depends on a share of the production of the investment project, including his right to purchase such share at a predetermined price or a price to be determined under an agreed formula.

Production units are classified into three groups: formal sector enterprises, informal sector enterprises, and households.

A production unit carries out an economic activity under the control and responsibility of an institutional unit using inputs of labour, capital and goods and services to produce outputs of goods and services. Enterprises can be very heterogeneous if they have several secondary activities that are quite different from their principal activities. In order to obtain groups of producers whose activities are more homogeneous, enterprises are partitioned into smaller and more homogeneous units of production like local units, kind-of-activity units, and establishments.

The production weighted tariff rate is, in concept, similar to producer support estimates. A measure of the value of transfers from domestic consumers to domestic producers. The measure does not capture the efficiency costs, and thus the loss in economic welfare attributable to such measures.

Generally include those employees who are engaged in fabrication, assembly and related activities, material handling, warehousing and shipping, maintenance and repair, janitorial and guard services, auxiliary production (such as power plants), and other services closely related to the above activities. Working supervisors are generally included, while apprentices and other trainees are generally excluded.

Producing food for self.

Productive capital stock is the stock of a particular, homogenous, asset expressed in ‘efficiency’ units. The importance of the productive stock derives from the fact that it offers a practical tool to estimate capital services. Typically, the latter are assumed to be proportional to the former.

Productivity is commonly defined as a ratio of a volume measure of output to a volume measure of input use. While there is no disagreement on this general notion, a look at the productivity literature and its various applications reveals very quickly that there is neither a unique purpose for nor a single measure.

Relates to the birth, growth and death rates of a stock. A highly productive stock is characterised by high birth, growth and mortality rates, and as a consequence, a high turn-over and production to biomass ratio (P/B). Such stocks can usually sustain higher exploitation rates and, if depleted, could recover more rapidly than comparatively less productive stocks.