THE METHODOLOGY OF REGION ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT EVALUATION USING MOBILE POSITIONING DATA

• Main Authors: Arhipova, Irina, Berzins, Gundars, Brekis, Edgars, Kravcova, Jevgenija, Binde, Juris
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Business; Cellular telephones; Cities; Communications networks; Confidentiality; Data processing; Decision making; Demographics; Economic activity; Economic conditions; Economic development; Economics; Factor analysis; Investments; Latency; Location based services; Methods; Municipalities; Personal information; Population (statistical); Population density; Portable computers; Privacy; Public safety; R&D; Regions; Research & development; Statistical analysis; Statistics; Sustainable development; Telecommunications policy; Tourism; Wireless networks; Working hours
• ISSN: 1849-6903; 1849-6903

Aggregate business conditions are vital for the public and decision-makers as to make real decisions, accurate and timely estimates of the conditions should be available. One of the national statistics tasks is to provide with reliable information on the economic, social and demographic processes based on internationally recognized methodology. However, it is not permanently available, especially in municipalities level due to confidentiality restrictions or due to high costs, and this statistic always proclaims economic activity changes long after the fact. At the same time, the companies with operations and customers throughout the Latvia regions collect and regularly update a customer database. So, the rapid development of mobile technologies is giving the new source of statistical data, mobile positioning data, to evaluate the economic development of regions. The objective of the paper is to test mobile positioning data suitability for a theoretical model of updatable Latvian regional business index. The source of the Call Data Record is the largest Latvian mobile network operator "Latvijas Mobilais Telefons". The latency of business conditions is consistent with economic theory which emphasizes that economic activity is about the dynamics and co-movement of many observable variables, so factor analysis was utilized to get basic statistics for Latvian regional business index. It is the clear difference between weekdays and weekend days that indicate call activity relation to economic activity. The results show the difference of the number of call and number of unique users, as well average call intensity between cities and counties. That could be justified by regions size (number of inhabitants, the density of population) as well as by different economic activity in the regions. Cities and counties with the less call activities have a lower economic activity to compare with the other region with high call activities during normal working hours.