The use of multilateral indexes is increasingly an accepted approach for incorporating scanner data in a Consumer Price Index. The attractiveness stems from the ability to be able to control for chain drift bias. Consensus on two key issues has yet to be achieved: (i) the best multilateral...

Increases in purchased services, foreign outsourcing, and investments in computers are alleged to have resulted in an understatement of input growth in manufacturing, and thus. overstatement of growth in productivity. GNP, and value-added in industries heavily engaged in these activities. Based...

This paper reports preliminary results of a detailed audit of one component of the Producer Price Index (PPI), using data from a large muiltproduct company. We compare price indexes constructed in a variety of ways from the universe of products of a large pharmaceutical manufacturer in the US,...

This paper rehabilitates the concept of effective rate of protection for use in political economy. The usual definition corresponds to no economically interesting magnitude in general equilibrium. The effective rate of protection for a sector is redefined here as the uniform tariff which is...

In this paper we focus on alternative procedures for calculating and interpreting quality-adjusted price indexes for microcomputers, based on a variety of estimated hedonic price equations. Our data set comprises an unbalanced panel for 1265 model observations from 1982 to 1988, and includes...

The paper considers the problem of choosing a multilateral system of index numbers in order to make aggregate price and quantity comparisons between many countries and regions. The problems involved in choosing functional forms in order to make these comparisons are both theoretically and...