This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle, economic theory tells us how we should calculate a true cost-of-living...

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the single most important indicator of inflation used by the European Central Bank. Sections 2 to 4 of the paper look at the theory of inflation indexes that could be used as target indexes of inflation. A Consumer Price Index (CPI) emerges as...

We construct a T¨ornqvist daily price index using Japanese point of sale (POS) scanner data spanning from 1988 to 2013. We find the following. First, the POS based inflation rate tends to be about 0.5 percentage points lower than the CPI inflation rate, although the difference between the two...

After the collapse of the asset price bubble, especially over the period of declining prices of goods and services from the latter 1990s until recently, it is said that certain Japanese firms have been working to stimulate demand by active price adjustment. Nevertheless, over the same period,...

Inflation is currently low and falling in the OECD area. A side effect of these facts is that they made harder the task of price index compilers. First of all, researchers and analysts are moving their attention from aggregate price dynamics to price differentials (among products, markets,...

The issues relating to the complexity of the measurement of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is regarded as the best and most well known indicator of inflationary trends and without referring to which economic policies cannot be evaluated have long been debated. Any measurement error in CPI...

Quality adjustment of price indexes affects the analysis of many sensitive economic issues, such as real growth, productivity, international competitiveness, real wages, per-capita consumption and poverty, other than inflation. Hedonic methods are often recommended and increasingly used in the...

Given the importance of Consumer Price Index (CPI), there has been long debate on its measurement issues. It is the best and most well-known indicator of inflation, which is further used for evaluating the monetary and fiscal policy of a country. Other uses of CPI for indexation are social...

Hedonic methods are currently considered state-of-the-art for handling quality changes when compiling consumer price indices. The present article proposes first a mathematical description of characteristics and of elementary aggregates. In a following step, a hedonic econometric model is...

In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...