This paper analyzes international reserve diversification by examining changes in quantity shares of currencies held in foreign exchange reserves. It discusses alternative methodologies for constructing quantity shares and applies the preferred methodology to three sets of data on the currency...

Chaining is used in index number construction to update weights and link new items into an index. However, chained indexes can suffer from, sometimes substantial, drift. The Consumer Price Index Manual (ILO, 2004) recommends the use of dissimilarity indexes to determine when chaining is...

The standard cost-of-living index hinges on the assumption that there is free trade. Applying it to situations where trade barriers are present yields biased results with respect to a true cost-of-living index. Import price indices are particularly vulnerable to this bias since many of the goods...

According to the present guidelines for fiscal policy, the use of oil revenues in the Norwegian economy should over time equal the expected real return on the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG). An important question is therefore how to measure the real return, taking into account that the...

Az elmúlt évtizedben jelentõsen nõtt a komplex mutatók, indexek népszerûsége, amelyek alkalmasak arra, hogy az összetett kategóriákat, fogalmakat egy számba sûrítve jelenítsék meg. Ez a tanulmány egy olyan új, az indexkészítés területén eddig nem alkalmazott módszert...

In 2002, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) introduced a supplemental C-CPI-U employing a superlative formula to provide a closer approximation to a cost-of-living index (COLI). This paper focuses on whether the BLS can improve upon the headline CPI-U’s current biennial weight update...

In this paper, we consider an extension of the commonly used poverty gap measure that may be used to address he question of whether the elimination of poverty is a feasible objective, given sufficient political commitment. The resources potentially available to address poverty may be measured by...

We estimate standard errors (S.Es.) of month on month and year on year inflation in Pakistan based on data for the period of July 2001 to June 2010 using the stochastic approach as well as extended stochastic approach to index numbers. We develop a mechanism to estimate S.E. of period average...

Longitudinal changes in enterprises as concentration or fragmentation, births and deaths, are very common. These are all events causing the evolution of the business population, hence it is essential to register them properly to achieve correct estimates of economic macro-data. This is a...