IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-540-68721-4_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Longitudinal Analysis, Part 3 – Index Numbers

In: Interpreting Economic and Social Data

Author

Listed:
  • Othmar W. Winkler

    (Georgetown University, The McDonough School of Business)

Abstract

Index numbers are unique to socio-economic statistics and are well-established. The need for index numbers has never been seriously questioned. They also pursue the longitudinal study of socio-economic phenomena, but are not recognized as belonging to the analysis of time series. Index numbers seem to be different, with theories and problems of their own. The discussion has not really gone much beyond the thinking of Laspeyres and Paasche some 125 years ago. It reflects the scienceinspired ideal of that epoch concerning the measurement of ‘prices’ p, ‘quantities’ q, and the role of weights.1 There was a time when the discussion of Price-indexnumbers dominated the scene. By simply reversing prices p and quantities q, a price-index-number formula seemed readily convertible to a quantity-index-number with price weights. As will be discussed in the following, the classic ‘index-numberproblem’ is really a pseudo problem. Price measurement can be greatly simplified by recognizing the misconceptions about the nature of ‘price’, about the complex nature of ‘quantities,’ and about the unrecognized features of socio-economic data. All this has been ‘off the radar screen’ of statistical theory.

Suggested Citation

  • Othmar W. Winkler, 2009. "Longitudinal Analysis, Part 3 – Index Numbers," Springer Books, in: Interpreting Economic and Social Data, chapter 0, pages 101-137, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-68721-4_7
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-68721-4_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-68721-4_7. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.