Reading Time: 11 minutes1. How to test a “Law” that keeps changing its mind This is the second instalment in a short series on the relationship between unemployment and economic growth, Okun’s Law. The first post introduced the idea and its two main specifications; this one is the…

Reading Time: 14 minutesEkonomisti vole zakone. Stvarnost voli izuzetke. Okunov zakon sedi nezgodno između: dovoljno je slavan da zasluži veliko početno slovo, dovoljno je skroman da dolazi sa prećutnim sleganjem ramenima. On povezuje tržište rada sa poslovnim ciklusom tako što, u suštini, kaže da kada proizvodnja razočara, nezaposlenost…

Reading Time: 14 minutesEconomists love laws. Reality loves exceptions. Okun’s Law sits awkwardly in between: famous enough to earn a capital letter, modest enough to come with an implied shrug. It links the labour market to the business cycle by stating, in essence, that when output disappoints, unemployment…

Reading Time: 9 minutes1. Part 2 introduction Part 1 established the structural anatomy of the series: a strong trend plus durable seasonality. Part 2 asks three applied questions that matter for analysts and policymakers. First, how persistent is construction activity once you look beyond the seasonal pattern? Second,…

Reading Time: 7 minutesThis post analyses in two parts Serbia’s quarterly Construction index (base 2021 = 100) over 2000Q1–2024Q4. The tone is deliberately “macro-for-educated-readers”, but the logic is firmly time-series: separate the long-run trajectory from regular seasonal swings, then ask what remains, and whether that “remainder” lines up…

Reading Time: 5 minutesDigitalisation is routinely marketed as the straightest line from the shop floor to higher productivity. Install the software, connect the machines, automate the paperwork, and competitiveness should follow. Yet inside real manufacturing firms, especially mid-sized ones operating under tight labour markets and uncertain demand, digital…

Reading Time: 5 minutesESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance, has become finance’s favorite shorthand for “future-proofing.” In theory, firms that manage environmental exposure, social relations, and governance quality should be safer borrowers: fewer regulatory shocks, fewer reputational blow-ups, cleaner compliance, better management discipline. That intuition has helped ESG migrate…

Reading Time: 7 minutesData context and figures. This note interprets a set of monthly charts for Serbia’s retail trade (constant prices) and catering (constant prices). The figures include original vs seasonally adjusted series (in levels and logs), STL decompositions, a scatterplot matrix, first- and seasonally-differenced views, “trend vs…

Reading Time: 7 minutes1. Introduction Unit labour cost (ULC) is a compact measure of cost-pressures from wages relative to productivity. When ULC rises, each unit of output requires more labour cost; when it falls, firms can produce the same output with cheaper effective labour. In an export-exposed sector…

Reading Time: 9 minutes1. Introduction Average wages are one of the cleanest windows into an economy’s living-standard dynamics. They condense firm-level conditions, labour-market tightness, bargaining institutions, and macro shocks into a single sequence that households feel directly. In Serbia, wage statistics are published monthly and, viewed over two…