CAN BENFORD'S LAW REFLECT MAJOR ECONOMİC CHANGES?

This paper examines a range of additional economic indicators in which Benford's law might apply. Specifically, it concerns the indicator of sales in the Czech Republic, monitored in three different sectors (manufacturing, trade, and hospitality, i.e., accommodation and catering). At the same time, the analysis has also been performed on the data mix created by aggregating data from these sectors. This paper also examines whether the validity of Benford's law in these sectors could have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic or what the changes in the validity of Benford's law have been from the time before the pandemic (2019), during the pandemic (2020), and then after the partial relaxation of the strict restrictive measures (2021). It turns out that the validity of the law is only partial and varies across both sectors and years. On the other hand, it must also be acknowledged that, visually, the shape of the logarithmic curve governing the occurrence frequencies of the first and second digits from the left generally confirms the corresponding frequency distribution values, even if the goodness-of-fit tests do not prove the full validity of the law.