Statistical Terms Glossary

In the financial accounts, the item other deposits includes all claims, other than transferable deposits, on the central bank, other depository institutions, government units and, in some cases, other institutional units that are represented by evidence of deposit.

Deposits in the form of shares or similar evidence of deposit issued by mutual associations such as savings and loans, building societies, credit unions, and the like are classified as bank deposits.

An approach to allocating the capital costs of a project under which the regulatory asset base is periodically "re-valued" to be equal to the price of building or buying a modern equivalent asset, depreciated to reflect the shorter remaining life of the existing assets.

Depreciation is the loss in value of an asset due to ageing.

Depreciation as usually calculated in business accounts is a method of allocating the costs of past expenditures on fixed assets over subsequent accounting periods.

Note that the depreciation methods favoured in business accounting and those prescribed by tax authorities almost invariably deviate from the concept of consumption of fixed capital employed in the SNA and so the term “consumption of fixed capital” is used in the SNA to distinguish it from “depreciation” as typically measured in business accounts.

A line on a map or chart that connects points of equal water depth.

A case in which at least one wheel of a train leaves the rails.
Note: Derailments as a result of collisions are excluded. These are classified as collisions.

Deregulation is a subset of regulatory reform and refers to complete or partial elimination of regulation in a sector to improve economic performance.

See synthetic floating rate notes.

A derivative instrument is a financial instrument whose value depends on some underlying financial asset, commodity index or predefined variable.

See Derivative instrument

Rights, notably social security benefits or residence, are the rights that accrue to an individual but which originate from and depend on her or his relationship with another person, usually a relationship of parenthood, marriage or cohabitation.

Seawater and other salty water that has been turned into freshwater.

Water produced annually by desalination of brackish or salt water. It is estimated annually on the basis of the total capacity of water desalination installations.

The process of removing salt and other impurities from oceanic or brackish water. Distillation can be used to obtain very small volumes of water, but resource-intensive techniques such as reverse osmosis, electrodialysis, or other membrane technologies must be employed for larger throughputs; The removal of salts from saline water to provide fresh water.

Process of removing dissolved salt and other minerals from seawater to create freshwater.

This refers to policies aiming to reduce or eliminate segregation (vertical and horizontal) in the labour market.

Desertification is the process of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub—humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations (drought) and human activities (overexploitation of drylands)

It is a survey statistic computed as the quotient of the variability in the parameter estimate of interest resulting from the sampling design and the variability in the estimate that would be obtained from a simple random sample of the same size.

Designer bugs is a popular term for microbes developed through biotechnology that can degrade specific toxic chemicals at their source in toxic waste dumps or in groundwater

See Cut-throat competition

2. A wide definition of destructive fishing practices would include overfishing beyond reasonable recovery, damaging levels of bycatch, fishing of spawning aggregations, bottom trawling over vulnerable habitat, and ghost fishing by discarded gear.; 3. There is no definition of destructive fishing practices. Virtually all types of fishing gear have an environmental impact, but the impact varies tremendously depending on how the gear is used and the frequency of use. The most destructive practices, such as the use of explosives, were abolished by the European Union in 1998 (Regulation 850/98 of 30 March 1998). Other practices, however, such as bottom trawls, gillnets and, in some cases, dredges, can also damage fragile ecosystems or endanger non-targeted fish species.; 1. Destructive fishing is the use of fishing gear in ways or in places such that one or more key components of an ecosystem are obliterated, devastated or rendered useless. Destructive fishing causes indiscriminate harm to marine life, in disproportion to the resulting seafood production or other human benefits, and often results in long-term damage to the physical structure of habitats. The normal consequences of the sustained harvest of fishery resources, including decreases in the abundance or biomass of target populations and associated ecosystem consequences of the decreased abundance, do not constitute destructive fishing.

When a gear is used in the wrong habitat, such as bottom trawls in sea grass, macro algae or coral beds, where the gear should be prohibited or used at a rate that would only affect a relatively small part of the given habitat.