Since late 1991, the IMF Statistics Department has conducted a program of technical assistance on consumer and producer price measurement and index compilation for the countries that have emerged from the former Soviet Union. These are countries whose economies are in various states of...

In this paper some of the practical issues related to improving the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) are discussed. The general problem of choosing an appropriate price index number formula is presented and both the axiomatic and economic theoretic approaches are used to examine the problem. An...

This paper discusses and analyzes selected pertinent statistical and economic questions raised by the shift in price statistics towards covering broader markets of the economy, namely introducing a Producers Price Index (PPI) series in place of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) series in Egypt...

The effect on the household consumption price index from possible sources of error in capturing digital products depends on the weight of the affected products. To calculate upper bounds for this effect, we apply weights based on the average structure of household consumption in OECD countries...

In Germany, package holidays are an important driver of consumer prices. Several challenges arise when measuring the price development of these bundled travel and accommodation services, such as the quality of accommodation and the timing of booking. Statistical practices are currently based on...

Lacking data on price levels across locations (countries, national regions, etc.) for cross-space comparisons, researchers resort to local consumer price indexes (CPIs) over time to evaluate these levels. This approach unfortunately fails to specify, even generally, the exactness of such...

This study has adopted the actual household expenditure data from the national accountstoconstruct a true inflation rate (using the Fisher index) and found that the official inflationrateinthe 33 OECD countries was an overestimate of true inflation for 22 and underestimate in11countries in the...

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...

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggregation of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

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...