2. The basic concepts of social and economic statistics

This lesson looks at some of the most important concepts of social and economic statistics. A knowledge of these concepts is essential not only to understanding statistics, but also to being able to follow the news, for example. Population, incomes, well-being, unemployment, inflation and GDP are all concepts you are bound to come across almost every day in the news. In this lesson you will learn to recognize these concepts and understand what they mean.

We begin by dealing with population phenomena: birth rate, mortality and migration. You will learn to recognize the most important forces of change and understand how they influence population development.

Well-being is another important area of statistical analysis. However, the measurement of well-being is often very difficult. This lesson teaches you how statistics can be compiled on people's well-being; you will also learn about the concept of income and about different types of income.

The labour market lesson will give you an idea of how the labour market is described by statistics. The key concepts in this area are those of labour force, employment and unemployment, which are all covered in the lesson.

Finally, we concentrate on two key economic concepts, i.e. inflation and gross domestic product or GDP.