T his article describes an important improvement in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Bureau of Labor Statistics plans to use a new geometric mean formula for calculating most of the basic components of the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). This change will become effective ...

1. Introduction and Motivation The International Price Program (IPP) publishes monthly price indexes which measure the average change over time in prices of internationally traded products and services. IPP's sampling methodology supports its published merchandise price indexes by attempting to maintain a minimum number of items over the two year life cycle 1 of each published stratum. Retentio...

Beneficiaries of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program received an 11.2-percent cost-of-living increase in benefits effective June 1981. This increase, the seventh automatic increase since 1975, was reflected in btiefit checks issued early in July. Automatic benefit increases are tied by statute to rises in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are initiated whenever t...

The consumer price index (CPI) is an important indicator of inflation in a market economy. It is necessary to regularly monitor and improve the quality of the CPI. Before one can develop a quality assurance system, one has to formulate a conceptual framework for evaluating the quality of consumer price statistics. In this paper various quality aspects of the CPI are presented. These aspects are...

Socml security checks dellwred to benefiaanes m the first week of July 1977 reflected the thwd automatic cost-of-hvmg nxrease m cash benefits under legulatlon enacted m 1972 and 1973 The 5 Q-percent merease, which became effectwe m June, apphed to benefits for all persons on the social security benefit rolls at the end of May, except those recelvlng benefits under the “special mnunum” PIA provw...

This paper compares the Portuguese and Bulgarian consumer price indices (CPI) and attempts to identify some areas in which the CPI compilation methodology could be improved in the two countries. This work is organised into six sections. The first section briefly describes the organisational structure on which the production of the CPI is based in the two countries. The second section focuses on...

While much of the trade liberalisation literature analyses liberalisation effects on trade volumes, we postulate the implications of trade liberalisation for price transmission and market integration between tomato producer and consumer markets under a high and a reduced period of agricultural, import tariffs in Ghana. Our objective is to determine whether price transmission and thus the factor...

Oil price shocks are the major source of economic instability in oil exporting developing countries, including Iran. In this paper a Multi Sector Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, with emphasis on optimization of oil sector as a producing sector is designed. Furthermore, an optimizing import sector is introduced into the model by considering the price rigidity in imported goods as a...

Food products account for a significant amount of the Iranian imports. Despite the rising prices of food products over the last two decades, their imports have been increasing too. In this study import demand of the main imported food products is empirically analyzed using Quadratic AIDS. Welfare impacts are measured using compensated variation. The results indicate that all products, except te...

the purpose of this study is to examine the dynamic effects of some macroeconomic variables: money stock, gross domestic product, consumer price index and exchange rates on determining housing price index behavior in iran using the error correction model. using seasonal data, the model is estimated by johansen-juselius cointegration approach during 1990-2007. the results reveal that all variabl...