The paper deals with issues that have been found important for the treatment of financial services in Swedish price indices. In particular the definition of the unit transaction for fund and stock-brokering services with charge proportional to transaction value is crucial. Such services have more than a negligible extent in Sweden, also for consumers, and different definitions of the unit trans...

Recalling the resolution adopted by the Fourteenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians concerning consumer price indices and recognizing the continuing validity of the basic principles recommended therein and, in particular, the fact that the consumer price index (CPI) is designed primarily to measure the changes over time in the general level of prices of goods and services that a...

This paper shows that the distribution of preferences among agents in a market can justify the aggregation of prices into group-price indices.

 Overall, taking account of both coverage and formula effect differences and within the limitations of how price data is collected within the UK, the Retail Prices Index (RPI) is as good a consumer price index as one can get for uprating purposes. The systemic difference between the RPI and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), currently (2015) running at 1.0 percentage points per annum, results pr...

The consumer price index (CPI) is usually computed as a fixed-weighted Laspeyres price index, with the weights updated at discrete intervals only. It is well known that the Laspeyres functional form entails a substitution bias. One way to reduce it would be to use chained indices, and superlative ones if possible. Unfortunately, the necessary data are often missing. This paper proposes a simple...