Post date: Nov 14, 2016 3:32:35 PM
The past two weeks have been very busy. We have been working diligently to continue to revise the Introductory, Background, and Methodology sections as our project evolves and changes. The first major road bump we encountered was understanding the Venice Chamber of Commerce data. The column headers specifically, as you can see below, were very difficult to understand in the Italian and then translate to English. We gained some insight on there meaning from our adviser Fabio Carrera, but we had to do some major internet digging until we discovered this. The legend we found helped us understand around 3/4 of the headers, but included the important ones we needed for our project. The second part of the data that we were still blind to was the activity's or the descriptions of each company that were in Italian and how those were coded. We ended in up using a macro in Microsoft Excel to translate the descriptions as necessary and then discovered the Activity Code which was the descriptions put into a unique number code. The last problem we had to solve was which code we were using and it turned out to be the 2007 ATECO code that is shown in the attached spreadsheet. Getting past these road bumps were timely jobs but are important to our analysis of the Italian business situation past and present.