A general qualitative technique for the comparison of economic structures

Abstract

Quantitative methods normally do not fully exhaust nor sufficiently show the structural information contained in sets of data. Therefore the authors introduce a new general technique for analyzing structures which is based on qualitative methods. The proposed technique can be divided into several steps. First, the given structural information is prepared with the help of graph theoretical tools. Then the obtained results are condensed in several steps to manageable vectors (key values), the most important step being the construction of graph theoretical decay patterns. These strongly condensed data allow the use of statistical methods and offer the chance to compare even a large number of structures simultaneously. After having introduced the necessary theoretical tools, the authors then present the results of some empirical investigations which showed the usefulness of the proposed technique. Compared with the corresponding quantitative methods, the empirical investigations also showed that our technique is relatively robust with respect to short-comings in the primary material. This result opens up opportunities for obtaining more actual yet costsaving structural information.