More Papers From This Author in World Economics:
What a Consumer Price Index Can’t Do
A monthly consumer price index traces changes in the monthly cost of a year’s
consumption using a sample of prices. But in some months the prices that can be
sampled will temporarily exclude some of the products that were bought in the
base year, Christmas trees providing a textbook example. Worse still, it becomes
permanently impossible to observe prices for sampled products that have been
completely superseded. There are methods for dealing with these two problems,
but they leave serious and irremediable defects in the index.
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Wanted: Measures of Economic Change
Economic growth may involve change, but there can be change without
economic growth insofar as outputs of some products or employment in some
regions or industries grows while there are equal decreases elsewhere. National
accounts data do not reveal such shifts, yet they may involve investment and
disinvestment, require the acquisition of new skills and cause changes in the
location of economic activities. Some simple examples are provided,
demonstrating that the rate of growth and the pace of change are by no means
perfectly correlated. Hence separate measures of change are required if we are to
understand what is happening in the economy.
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Owner-occupiers and the Price Index
The treatment of owner-occupied dwellings in Consumer Price Indexes varies between countries and is the subject of continuing controversy. Ralph Turvey explains the alternative possible treatments and reasons for disagreement.
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