Page 161 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 3

STS538 Rameshwar S.
not use the local CPI to adjust salaries and allowances of international staff
and hence International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) compiles indices
which are used to adjust salaries and allowances of United Nations and other
international agencies staff.
International organizations and national statistical offices in recent years
have devoted much attention to the following topics, which needs further
discussions:
(i) New sources of data such as electronic scanner data; web-scraped
data;
(ii) Need for constructing and publishing more than one CPI that will
meet specific requirements;
(iii) Compilation of housing indices, which could be internationally
comparable;
(iv) Measuring the online purchases.
One of the disadvantage of online prices is that it covers a small number
of retailers and quantities sold is lacking. The advantages of online data is low
cost, more frequency, and one could price all products available at retailer
web. The advantages of traditional CPI data is more retailers and product
categories are covered. The quantities or expenditure weights derived from
the Consumer Expenditure Surveys are available. The disadvantage is the
higher cost and lower frequency. Both online and offline data should be used
and complement each other.
In case of a smaller country one CPI could be enough for example BVI or
USVI. Many countries are compiling more than one CPI, as in case of India
shown in Table 4 above to meet the specific needs, because one CPI cannot
serve all.

References
1. Sierra Leone Government (1984). Technical Report on Revision of
Consumer Price Index for Freetown with Base 1978=100 (CSO Freetown,
August 1984)
2. Sierra Leone CPI Report 2012 (2013). Published by Statistics Sierra Leone
in September 2013
3. Scott, C. (1983). A note on weights for consumer price indexes. INTER-
STAT no.8, pp.51-55, March 1993
4. Srivastava, R. (1998). A note on weights for consumer price indexes.
INTER-STAT no.17, pp 89¬96, September 1998
5. Turvey, R. et al. (1989). Consumer price indices: an ILO manual,
International Labour Office, 1989
6. UNECE/ILO/IMF/OECD/Eurostat/The World Bank (2009). Practical Guide
to producing Consumer Price Indices, United Nations, New York and
Geneva, 2009

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