Centrality-oriented causality. A study of EU agricultural subsidies and digital development in Poland

Abstract

Results of a convincing causal statistical inference related to socio-economic phenomena are treated as an especially desired background for conducting various socio-economic programmes or government interventions. Unfortunately, quite often real socio-economic issues do not fulfil restrictive assumptions of procedures of causal analysis proposed in the literature. This paper indicates certain empirical challenges and conceptual opportunities related to applications of procedures of data depth concept into a process of causal inference as to socio-economic phenomena. We show how to apply statistical functional depths in order to indicate factual and counterfactual distributions commonly used within procedures of causal inference. Thus, a modification of Rubin causality concept is proposed, i.e., a centrality-oriented causality concept. The presented framework is especially useful in the context of conducting causal inference based on official statistics, i.e., on the already existing databases. Methodological considerations related to extremal depth, modified band depth, Fraiman-Muniz depth, and multivariate Wilcoxon sum rank statistic are illustrated by means of example related to a study of an impact of EU direct agricultural subsidies on digital development in Poland in the period 2012-2018.