Product Description

This text provides a simple and straightforward introduction to econometrics for the beginner. The author's intent is to provide the student with a "user friendly," non-intimidating introduction to econometric theory and techniques. The book motivates students to understand econometric techniques through extensive examples, careful explanations, and a wide variety of problem material. The audience is undergraduate economics, agricultural economics, and business administration majors, MBA students and others in the social and behavioral sciences where econometric techniques, especially the techniques of linear regression analysis, are used.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194566 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Customer Reviews

One of the Best introductory Economterics texts out there!
Gujarati's BASIC ECONOMETRICS uses divide and conquer method to help readers achieve a solid grasp of the basics of econometrics. Each chapter takes on a major concept and explains it thouroughly. As the name suggests, this is basic econometrics and hence does not make much use of matrix algebra and other mathematical tools often used in advanced econometrics. However, all the statistical and mathematical concepts used are included in the appendix. If one's aim is to prepare for graduate level econometrics, then a more advanced text would be recommended. Otherwise, this book is the right way to enter the world of econometrics.

a big help
Gujarati has written a series of textbooks on econometrics, and I have found each of them to be useful. In the middle '70's, when econometric methods were catching on in a big way in sociology and political science, many of us felt as if we had been reduced to premature obsolescence: econometrics, whatever it's virtues, was typically presented in a densely mathematical fashion which made it inaccessible to non-specialists. The 1975 version of Gujarati's text, however, was a real help in making econometrics interpretable. This text is written in the same accessible way, and it's coverage of important topics has kept pace with developments in the literature. Econometrics is never easy reading, but Gujarati has done it about as well as can be done.

My only difficulty with this text is that the author spends a great deal of time with simple regression, introducing assumptions, tests for violations of assumptions, and possible remedies. His account would be more interesting if he got to multiple regression, using interesting examples, a good deal earlier than he does. This could be accomplished without departing from Gujarati's early emphasis on introduction of requirements of the classical linear regression model.

Awful Verbose Book
With its proud eschewing of math (the back of the book says "'basic' means less math"), the book strains to explain concepts without sensible math notation. Simple ideas become long paragraphs because of this. It's almost as if Gujarati has turned the lectures he gives at the university at which he teaches into a book. Instead of being a resource of good example problems and concisely expressed formulas, we have a long book with too little content and too much talking to retain student interest. Perhaps less math oriented students would appreciate this book, but most students who choose to take intro-econometrics have some interest in economics itself, which, more often than not, requires more advanced study of econometrics, which, unlike this book, won't resist the math intrinsic to econometrics. Worse still is the organization of this book, which, given its emphasis on formulas, hasn't done a very good job of making the formulas easy to find.

Not recommended.