Page 176 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 3

STS538 Pedro Luis do N. S. et al.
IBGE still has no access to scanner data. However, a peculiar feature of the
fiscal system of Bra-zil points for another source that can be even more
attractive than scanner data. The fiscal legislation in Brazil requires that every
legal sales transaction performed by a store (brick and mortar or online)
generates an individual electronic record with information that includes:
description and code of each product sold; the price paid per unit of each
product sold; the total price paid by product; the total amount paid; the date
and time of the sale; the media used for payment (cash, credit or debit card);
and detailed information on the establishment, including its unique fiscal
identification code (the CNPJ). In some cases, information on the buyer is also
available, especially for transactions where buyers are enterprises.
The information contained in the e-records is as useful as those contained
in scanner data sets and would therefore provide one of the best data sources
for CPI compilation. Such information is already provided to government fiscal
entities, covering all the legal transactions performed by all retailers in the
country. Currently the e-records are collected by the states’ tax authorities and
consolidated for the whole country by the Federal Revenue Service.
The access to the information contained in the data base of the e-records
could provide many improvements for the NSCPI. It should be possible to
expand the coverage of the NSCPI to finer geographical levels, and to compile
CPIs for different target populations based on consumer baskets constructed
for different profiles (finer level of income ranges, for instance). The use of
more powerful superlative indices would also be possible since information on
price and quantities are available in such data sets. The e-records can
potentially provide information or the derivation of more frequent updates of
the CPI baskets and the weights of the basket components. The number of
elements in the basket could also be increased, since the “collection costs”
which scales with the number of items in the baskets and constrains the
number of elements to be priced are not present here, though processing and
storage costs of the e-records should be considered. The indices could, in
principle, be calculated in higher frequencies since the information is updated
more frequently.
Important challenges are also posed for the use of the e-records for CPI
compilation. The first is the access to such data. The e-records are protected
by fiscal confidentiality laws, and so far, IBGE has not managed to get legal
rights to access to the transactions e-records. To try to circumvent this
restriction initial negotiations were held with the tax authorities for the access
but so far have not succeeded.
Another important point to consider is that product descriptions and
classifications in the e-records are probably not in straight correspondence
with the classification required by the CPI. Such analysis and the integration of
the e-records into a classification and unified product description system as

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