Consumer Price Monitoring in Germany - ZMP-Panel of retail trade

摘要

The ZMP-Panel of retail trade began in 1960 and was supported for several years by the government (Ministry of Agriculture). Since 2000 organic products have been integrated into the panel so that it is possible to compare prices for conventional foods with organic foods. The panel is a market research instrument for consumer price monitoring in Germany. The most important task for this project is to create market transparency for agricultural products at the retail trade level. In order to get the data, a particular group of people (reporters) note down the consumer prices in certain shops every week or every month for a defined list of products, the so-called "Warenkorb", basket of goods. The data is processed by the ZMP using a special computer programme database. The conventional consumer prices are published on-line each week. The organic consumer prices are published monthly in the OKOMARKT Forum. Our price information is always up to date (one week or one month behind) and we are able to present data for a homogeneous time series because we have collected the same prices over a number of years. Since the beginning of 2004 the Ministry of Agriculture has cut financial support for this project so that the ZMP has to reorganize the panel and find other and cheaper ways to collect consumer prices.