The latest United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)/International Labour Office (ILO) joint meeting on consumer price indexes was held in Geneva on 8 and 9 May 2008. The meeting was preceded by a meeting on consumer price indexes for countries with economies in transition on 7 May 2008. John Morris (Manager – Prices, at Statistics New Zealand) attended the meetings.
Meeting on consumer price indexes for countries with economies in transition
The main topic of this meeting was to review the progress and content of the practical chapters of the ILO consumer price index (CPI) manual and the preparation of a supplementary handbook to the CPI manual. The development of the handbook will meet a need for examples of practical solutions to issues that arise in the production of CPIs. Topics discussed covered the full production of a CPI and included:
- scope and uses of a CPI
- price collection
- substitution, quality change and new products
- index compilation, chain linking and re-weighting
- expenditure weights and their sources
- sampling
- treatment of special cases (eg seasonal products and volatile prices)
- errors and bias
- organisation and management
- publication, dissemination and related issues
- CPI/International Comparison Programme integration.
There was wide-ranging discussion on these topics, from different experiences and viewpoints. The overall conclusion was that the draft handbook was a good start, but the content could be extended with practical examples, and there were other topics that needed to be covered.
The ILO had recently surveyed members (including New Zealand) on the use made, and usefulness, of the CPI manual. Results were presented at the meeting. The majority of respondents provided positive or neutral comments on the content and usefulness of the manual. The general view was that the conceptual issues were well covered, but that there was a lack of direction on how to produce a CPI from scratch. A need for more information on how to apply the concepts and principles to different real world situations was identified. The need for a document such as the proposed handbook was endorsed by the survey results.
The meeting agenda, relevant papers, and the report of the meeting are available on the UNECE website http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/2008.05.cpi2.htm.
Joint UNECE/ILO meeting on consumer price indexes
This meeting marked 30 years since the first UNECE/ILO meeting on CPIs in 1978. One theme was a review of work done in the past 30 years, and a focus on what the on-going role of the meeting should be. There was also discussion about current and emerging issues facing the production of CPIs.
The meeting started with reports on price statistics activities since the last meeting in 2006 by:
- Intersecretariat Working Group on Price Statistics (ISWGPS)
- UNECE
- ILO
- Ottawa Group
- International Monetary Fund
- European Statistical Office.
There was discussion on the following broad topics:
- collection and processing of price data (including the use of technology, the use of transaction data, optimal frequency of price collection, optimal design of collections, and editing techniques)
- future challenges and the role of the joint CPI meetings
- integration of price indexes (particularly with the purchasing power parity (PPP) data collections)
- other issues (measuring price change for mobile phones, differences between perceived and measured inflation, and quality adjustment examples).
There was discussion and comment on experiences and viewpoints from different countries and organisations.
These topics were proposed for the next meeting in 2010:
- house price indexes
- user relations and how to meet user needs
- quality adjustment for services in CPIs and producer price indexes (PPIs)
- the CPI and globalisation
- systems of price indexes (eg CPI, PPI, PPP, export/import price indexes, and sectoral price indexes).
The agenda, papers and final report of the meeting are on the UNECE website: http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/2008.05.cpi.htm.
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