Course on the Consumer and Producer Price Indices

Content

The course covers the design and collection of data for these indices, as well as their operation, calculation, and publication.

The topics covered in the sessions on Consumer Price Indices include, among others, the following: conceptual and methodological elements, basket design and weighting structure, sampling design for the selection of establishments and products, use of expenditure surveys, price collection, geographic coverage, general pricing criteria, product and source substitution, chaining, generic items with special criteria, base year, index reference period, prices and weights, data processing (cleaning, validation, outliers, and missing prices), product substitution and quality changes, index number theory, calculation of elementary (Jevons) and aggregate (Laspeyres) indices, base changes and historical series, chained indices, alternative data collection methods (web scraping, scanner data, and others), publication, institutional communication, and user relations. Some of these same topics are also covered in the sessions on Producer Price Indices, along with others such as the weighting structure, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), and data sources; missing prices (agriculture, manufacturing, services, and administrative records); and quality management systems and certification.