The Consumer Price Index: Conceptual Issues and Practical Suggestions

摘要

Committees of economists have long recommended that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should establish a cost-of-living index as the measurement objective for the Consumer Price Index, rather than regarding the CPI as measuring changes in the cost of purchasing a fixed basket of goods, and should undertake the research and operational changes necessary to move the CPI closer to that goal. A committee led by George Stigler made this recommendation back in 1961 (Stigler, 1961). The Boskin commission, appointed by the Finance Committee of the U.S. Senate, echoed this recommendation in its 1996 report (Boskin et al., 1996). The Consumer Price Index was traditionally based on the concept of measuring the change in a household's cost of purchasing a fixed basket of goods and services in the face of a change in prices between two periods―in shorthand, a cost-of-goods index. A more ambitious objective is to base the index on the concept of measuring the change in the cost of maintaining a household's standard of living at some specified level―a cost-of-living index. In an aggregate CPI, price and expenditure data must be combined to produce an estimate that reflects some measure of average change, in either the cost of goods purchased or the cost of maintaining a given living standard for all or for some subgroup of households. But the aggregation of index numbers over the population or over groups is not an issue that separates cost-of-living and cost-of-goods indexes.