Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of...

Inflation has been rising in Egypt over the last decade once again reaching double digit levels, and this has been a top concern for large segments of society. Furthermore, inflation in this period hit the rural areas harder, which is unusual for the Egyptian economy. Rising food prices were a...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major...

This paper presents an indirect approach to investigate the possible existence of measurement error bias in the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices for the UK and Italy. Our empirical results show that there is no significant evidence for a bias in the UK, nor for Italy prior to the introduction...

The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

Consumer price indices reflect changes through time in the prices of goods and services that are bought by households for the satisfaction of their consumption needs. In Greece, there are two different indicators of inflation issued by the National Statistical Service of Greece. The Consumer...

The COVID-19 Pandemic has led to changes in expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. I use publicly-available data on credit and debit card transactions to update the official CPI weights and re-calculate inflation with...

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...

One of the greatest challenges facing official statistics in the 21st century is the use of alternative sources of data about prices (scanned and scraped data) in the analysis of price dynamics, which also involves selecting the appropriate formula of the price index at the elementary group...

There have been important methodological changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over time. These distort comparisons of inflation from different periods, which have become more prevalent as inflation has risen to 40-year highs. To better contextualize the current run-up in inflation, this...