IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/canjec/v55y2022is1p480-502.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Measuring real consumption and consumer price index bias under lockdown conditions

Author

Listed:
  • W. Erwin Diewert
  • Kevin J. Fox

Abstract

Millions of goods and services are now unavailable in many countries due to the current coronavirus pandemic, dramatically impacting on the construction of key economic statistics used for informing policy. This situation is unprecedented; hence, methods to address it have not previously been developed. Current advice to national statistical offices from the International Monetary Fund, Eurostat and the United Nations is shown to result in downward bias in the consumer price index (CPI) and upward bias in real consumption. We conclude that, to produce a meaningful CPI within the lockdown period, it is necessary to establish a continuous consumer expenditure survey. Mesure de la consommation réelle et des biais par défaut de l’indice des prix à la consommation en période de confinement. En raison de la pandémie actuelle de COVID‐19, des millions de biens et de services sont présentement indisponibles dans de nombreux pays, entravant significativement l’élaboration de statistiques économiques clés visant à éclairer les politiques. Cette situation est sans précédent, et aucune méthode n'a encore été développée pour y remédier. Les avis dispensés aux organismes nationaux de statistiques par le Fonds monétaire international, Eurostat et les Nations Unies se traduisent par des biais systématiques par défaut quant à l'indice des prix à la consommation (IPC), et par des biais par excès quant à la consommation réelle. Notre conclusion est que pour produire un IPC significatif lors d'un confinement, il est nécessaire de procéder à une enquête continue sur les dépenses de consommation.

Suggested Citation

  • W. Erwin Diewert & Kevin J. Fox, 2022. "Measuring real consumption and consumer price index bias under lockdown conditions," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(S1), pages 480-502, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:canjec:v:55:y:2022:i:s1:p:480-502
    DOI: 10.1111/caje.12545
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12545
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/caje.12545?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ivancic, Lorraine & Erwin Diewert, W. & Fox, Kevin J., 2011. "Scanner data, time aggregation and the construction of price indexes," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 161(1), pages 24-35, March.
    2. W. Erwin Diewert & Kevin J. Fox, 2020. "Measuring Real Consumption and CPI Bias under Lockdown Conditions," NBER Working Papers 27144, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Timothy F. Bresnahan & Robert J. Gordon, 1996. "The Economics of New Goods," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number bres96-1, March.
    4. Jan de Haan & Frances Krsinich, 2014. "Scanner Data and the Treatment of Quality Change in Nonrevisable Price Indexes," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(3), pages 341-358, July.
    5. Walter Erwin Diewert & Marco Huwiler & Ulrich Kohli, 2009. "Retrospective Price Indices and Substitution Bias," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 145(II), pages 127-135, June.
    6. Hausman, Jerry, 1999. "Cellular Telephone, New Products, and the CPI," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 17(2), pages 188-194, April.
    7. Jerry Hausman, 2003. "Sources of Bias and Solutions to Bias in the Consumer Price Index," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 23-44, Winter.
    8. W. Erwin Diewert & Kevin J. Fox, 2022. "Substitution Bias in Multilateral Methods for CPI Construction," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(1), pages 355-369, January.
    9. Diewert, Erwin & FOX, Kevin J. Fox & SCHREYER, Paul, 2017. "The Digital Economy, New Products and Consumer Welfare," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2017-12, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 14 Dec 2017.
    10. Diewert, W. E., 1976. "Exact and superlative index numbers," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 115-145, May.
    11. Jack Triplett, 2004. "Handbook on Hedonic Indexes and Quality Adjustments in Price Indexes: Special Application to Information Technology Products," OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2004/9, OECD Publishing.
    12. Alberto Cavallo, 2020. "Inflation with Covid Consumption Baskets," NBER Working Papers 27352, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. W. Erwin Diewert, 1998. "Index Number Issues in the Consumer Price Index," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 47-58, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cardani, Roberta & Pfeiffer, Philipp & Ratto, Marco & Vogel, Lukas, 2023. "The COVID-19 recession on both sides of the Atlantic: A model-based comparison," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    2. Jung, Jinho & Kim, Yong J. & Kim, Sanghyo, 2022. "Sales-Weighted Online Agricultural Commodity Price Index: Using Sales and Price Data web-scraped from Online Grocery Stores in South Korea," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322525, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    3. Knetsch, Thomas A. & Schwind, Patrick & Weinand, Sebastian, 2022. "The impact of weight shifts on inflation: Evidence for the euro area HICP," Discussion Papers 27/2022, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    4. Hongjik Kim & Chihiro Shimizu, 2022. "The Relationship between Geographic Accessibility to Neighborhood Facilities, Remote Work, and Changes in Neighborhood Satisfaction after the Emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(17), pages 1-20, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. W. Erwin Diewert & Kevin J. Fox, 2020. "Measuring Real Consumption and CPI Bias under Lockdown Conditions," NBER Working Papers 27144, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. W. Erwin Diewert & Robert C. Feenstra, 2021. "Estimating the Benefits of New Products," NBER Chapters, in: Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics, pages 437-473, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Diewert, Erwin & FOX, Kevin J. Fox & SCHREYER, Paul, 2017. "The Digital Economy, New Products and Consumer Welfare," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2017-12, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 14 Dec 2017.
    4. Diewert, Erwin, 2019. "Quality Adjustment and Hedonics: A Unified Approach," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2019-2, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 14 Mar 2019.
    5. Diewert W. Erwin & Fox Kevin J., 2022. "Measuring Inflation under Pandemic Conditions," Journal of Official Statistics, Sciendo, vol. 38(1), pages 255-285, March.
    6. Diewert, Erwin & Feenstra, Robert, 2019. "Estimating the Benefits of New Products: Some Approximations," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2019-3, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 13 Mar 2019.
    7. Diewert, W, Erwin & Feenstra, Robert, 2017. "Estimating the Benefits and Costs of New and Disappearing Products," Microeconomics.ca working papers tina_marandola-2017-12, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 19 Dec 2017.
    8. Diewert, W. Erwin, 2017. "Productivity Measurement in the Public Sector: Theory and Practice," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2017-1, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 02 Feb 2017.
    9. Thomas von Brasch, 2013. "The cost-of-living index with trade barriers," Discussion Papers 751, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    10. Patrick Bajari & Zhihao Cen & Victor Chernozhukov & Manoj Manukonda & Jin Wang & Ramon Huerta & Junbo Li & Ling Leng & George Monokroussos & Suhas Vijaykunar & Shan Wan, 2023. "Hedonic prices and quality adjusted price indices powered by AI," CeMMAP working papers 08/23, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    11. Jerry Hausman, 2002. "Sources of Bias and Solutions to Bias in the CPI," NBER Working Papers 9298, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Thomas Brasch, 2017. "The import price index with trade barriers: theory and evidence," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 52(1), pages 123-141, February.
    13. W. Erwin Diewert & Kevin J. Fox & Paul Schreyer, 2022. "Experimental Economics and the New Commodities Problem," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 68(4), pages 895-905, December.
    14. Diewert, W. Erwin & Fox, Kevin J., 2016. "Kevin J. Fox Interview of W. Erwin Diewert," Microeconomics.ca working papers erwin_diewert-2016-6, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 02 Jun 2016.
    15. Jerry Hausman, 2003. "Sources of Bias and Solutions to Bias in the Consumer Price Index," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(1), pages 23-44, Winter.
    16. Erica L. Groshen & Brian C. Moyer & Ana M. Aizcorbe & Ralph Bradley & David M. Friedman, 2017. "How Government Statistics Adjust for Potential Biases from Quality Change and New Goods in an Age of Digital Technologies: A View from the Trenches," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(2), pages 187-210, Spring.
    17. Kozo Ueda & Kota Watanabe & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2021. "Household Inventory, Temporary Sales, and Price Indices," CARF F-Series CARF-F-520, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.
    18. Jaravel, Xavier & O'Connell, Martin, 2020. "Real-time price indices: Inflation spike and falling product variety during the Great Lockdown," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    19. Diewert, Erwin, 2007. "The Ottawa Group after Ten Meetings: Future Priorities," Economics working papers diewert-07-11-16-12-30-23, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 16 Nov 2007.
    20. Brynjolfsson, Erik & Collis, Avinash & Diewert, W. Erwin & Eggers, Felix & Fox, Kevin J., 2019. "GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy," OSF Preprints sptfu, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:canjec:v:55:y:2022:i:s1:p:480-502. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5982 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.