The 2004 International Labour Office Consumer Price Index Manual: Theory and Practice summarized the state of the art for constructing Consumer Price Indexes (CPIs) at that time. In the intervening decade, there have been some significant new developments which are reviewed in this paper. The...

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...

Once a business opts to purchase rather than produce an input, it can also change the source from which the product is procured. Producer price index programs face problems in dealing with price changes associated with sourcing changes. We present measures for price index bias due to sourcing...

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...

The impact of weekly, monthly and quarterly time aggregation on estimates of price change is examined for nineteen different supermarket item categories over a fifteen month period using scanner data. We find that time aggregation choices (the choice of a weekly, monthly or quarterly unit value...

Hedonic regressions are used for residential property price index (RPPI) measurement to control for changes in the quality-mix of properties transacted. This paper consolidates the confusing array of existing approaches and methods of implementation. It further develops an innovative form of...

In Germany, package holidays, which consist of a bundle of flight and accommodation services, are an important driver of consumer prices. Several challenges arise when measuring the price development of package holidays, for example the quality of accommodation, the timing of the booking, the...

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...

Index numbers are used to aggregate detailed information on prices and quantities into scalar measures of price and quantity levels or their growth. The paper reviews four main approaches to bilateral index number theory where two price and quantity vectors are to be aggregated: fixed basket and...

The paper briefly reviews the accomplishments of the Ottawa Group on the occasion of its tenth meeting and then goes on to list ten problem areas in price measurement that have not been completely resolved and hence should be a focus of future meetings. The ten problem areas are: (1) the...