Methodological aspects and empirical evidence in the use of administrative sources to estimate price dynamics in external trade

This paper explores the possibility to widen the current offer of unit value and price indicators in external trade throughout a more intensive and efficient use of the available administrative sources. In particular, it firstly overviews the opportunities offered by a fuller exploitation of custom records linkage to other sources, such as business registers. Secondly, it presents a suitable conceptual and methodological framework for the estimates of price indicators based on custom records regarding, on the one hand, the definition of the reference population and the target parameter and, on the other hand, a statistically founded method to supersede the lack of details on the characteristics of the products. A generalised method of univariate density estimation and clustering is proposed to estimate homogeneous market segments on the basis of the elementary unit value distribution. A basic version of such method is applied to a subset of Italian custom records referred to years 2005-2007 and it is used to simulate estimates of export and import price dynamics.