In this paper we review the well-known problem of how to measure price developments when the quality of the underlying goods and services is changing over time. The importance of appropriate methods to take account of quality change is highlighted from the perspective of monetary policy. In...

Quality is a subjective notion and encompasses all aspects of how well a product meets users’ needs. It is inherently a multi-faceted concept that cannot be easily defined; any chosen definition is likely to change over time as new aspects gain importance following the evolving users’ needs....

The preparations for the introduction of the euro in 1999 involved the need for a new set of statistics for the euro area. Since then, significant progress has been made with regard to the coverage, timeliness and accuracy of these statistics. The reliability of the first releases – i.e. their...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the adjustment for seasonal effects with different seasonal adjustment methods, the possible pre-treatment for calendar effects and the different order of aggregation and adjustment for the determination of the turning points of the European business...

Most of the Euro-zone economic short-term indicators are computed through aggregation from Member States data. The seasonally adjusted figures can be calculated by seasonally adjusting the aggregate (direct approach) or aggregating the seasonally adjusted national data (indirect approach)....