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This Handbook of contains 18 chapters on broadly three topics: first, applied economic statistics, second, econometric methodology and data issues and third, model specification and simulation. The book brings together survey material and new methodological results which are important to modern developments in applied economic statistics and econometrics. The emphasis is on data problems, methodological issues, and inferential techniques that arise in practice in a wide range of situations in applied sciences. The first five chapters are devoted to applied economic statistics. The chapter about economic statistics and social welfare comparisons surveys recent developments on measures of inequality and poverty. The authors argue in favor of disaggregated dominance criteria to make social welfare comparisons. Inequality measures are deeper analyzed in the chapter by \textit{W. Krämer}, and poverty issues are especially discussed in the chapter by \textit{M. Ravallion} on poor areas. Ravallion especially investigates the issue of persistence in the geography of poverty. He proposes a methodology for empirically testing the validity of two competing explanations of poverty: an individualistic model and a geographic model. Chapters 6 to 10 and 15 to 17 deal with econometric methodologies related to different kinds of data used in empirical research. Chapter 6 is concerned with problems of aggregation, and the next chapter, written by \textit{L. Anselin} and \textit{A.K. Bera}, addresses the problem of spatial autocorrelation as well as the correlation in cross-sectional data. \textit{A. Ullah} and \textit{R.V. Breunig} review the literature on complex sampling and indicate that the effect of misspecifying or ignoring true sampling schemes on the econometric inference can be quite serious. Panel data issues are reviewed by \textit{B.H. Baltagi}, distinguishing between linear and nonlinear parametric panel models. Closely related to this chapter is the one by \textit{A. Ullah} and \textit{N. Roy} who develop the nonparametric kernel estimation of panel data models without assuming their functional forms. Another topic, written by \textit{T. Teräsvirta}, looks into the modeling of time series data that exhibit nonlinear relationships due to discrete or smooth transitions and to regimes' switching. He proposes and develops a smooth transition regression analysis for such situations. Chapters 12 and 18 are related to simulation procedures and chapters 11, 13 and 14 to the model and selection procedures in econometrics. In general, the book presents up to date developments in applied economics with special emphasis on data problems. In this sense, the title of the book may be slightly misleading because one would expect a more general treatment of problems in applied economic statistics. But after this first short confusion the book is really worth reading and helps to enlarge and to improve the instruments of applied social scientists.