This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Rent, paid either to a landlord or to oneself as an owner-occupant, has a large weight in the CPI and in the personal consumption expenditures deflator. The authors describe how the Bureau of Labor Stat. (BLS) estimates tenant rent and owners¿ equivalent rent. They then estimate alternative inflation rates for tenant rent and owners¿ equivalent rent based on Amer. Housing Survey data, following BLS methodology as closely as possible. The authors¿ alternative tenant rent inflation series is generally consistent with the corresponding BLS series. However, their alternative owners¿ equivalent rent inflation series is consistently lower than the corresponding BLS series by an amount large enough to have a significant effect on the overall inflation rate.
The ability of central banks to differentiate between permanent & transitory price movements is critical for the conduct of monetary policy. The importance of gauging the persistence of price changes has led to the development of measures of underlying, or ¿core,¿ inflation that are designed to remove transitory price changes from aggregate inflation data. This article examines several proposed measures of core inflation -- the ex food & energy series, an ex energy series, a weighted median series, & an exponentially smoothed series -- to identify a ¿best¿ measure. Evaluates the measures¿ performance according to criteria such as ease of design, & accuracy in tracking trend inflation. Charts & tables.
Hydro resources are provided by nature. The exploitation of such resources can generate significant economic rent to the owners. In the past, governments have usually claimed ownership of hydroelectric resources and passed on the rents to their state-owned utilities, which have used them to expand their systems or provide lower tariffs to their consumers. With the restructuring of the electric power sector in many countries, a more explicit consideration of hydroelectric rents is required. Moreover, hydropower resources are often owned by more than one party, or at least require cooperation between parties to develop them. In this context, the measurement and apportionment of hydropower rents between cooperating parties becomes important. This paper addresses some of the issues involved in cooperative development of water resources, especially for hydroelectric generation. It promotes a better understanding of the sources of the benefits and attempts to derive an analytical basis for discussions between cooperating parties. This volume will be of interest to hydropower resource earning countries, hydropower developers, and Bank staff.
The HICP is a consumer price index which was designed to provide measures of inflation in EU member states calculated using similar methods and thus comparable one with another. The HICP now tracks the inflation rates covering over 500 million Europeans, including the UK, and is also produced by other countries such as the USA. John Astin was the EU statistician in charge of the initial development of this important index and he has the best knowledge of how it was developed in the 1990s. This book is a history of the main development period of the HICP, up to the year 2002 when Astin left the European Commission. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers, not only in the UK but globally. Types of readers are likely to include: economists, economic statisticians, national statistics offices, universities, libraries, government finance/economic ministries, international organizations such as UN, ILO, OECD, EU, Eurostat, ECB, and central banks, as well as individuals who are interested in the construction of consumer price indices. This book begins by explaining the background to the HICP project, both from an economic and a political viewpoint, and describes the specific needs for harmonized price indices resulting from the Maastricht treaty of 1992. It analyses the process of establishing the necessary procedures for taking this urgent work forward and gives details of the technical issues involved, and the critical issue of drafting legal acts which would be necessary to ensure full compliance with the new rules. It includes analysis of products, price collection issues, quality adjustment, timing, and a host of other issues, and discusses the arguments which had to be resolved, as well as some human aspects of the process too. It also looks at the funding aspects, the recruitment of specialist consultants, the legal processes and the organization of meetings, both in Luxembourg and in other countries.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
In light of the deflationary trends following the 2008/2009 financial crisis, as well as the return of inflation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, this book offers insights into price stability issues in various East Asian countries. Leading scholars from the fields of economics and law as well as central bank practitioners present case studies on Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. The contributors address topics such as quantitative monetary easing, the role of global and domestic shocks on inflation dynamics, and other monetary policy issues. In doing so, the book goes into detail about the individual forces and effects of deflation and inflation and compares the Asian experience with that of the Eurozone.
Although inflation is much feared for its negative effects on the economy, how to measure it is a matter of considerable debate that has important implications for interest rates, monetary supply, and investment and spending decisions. Underlying many of these issues is the concept of the Cost-of-Living Index (COLI) and its controversial role as the methodological foundation for the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Price Index Concepts and Measurements brings together leading experts to address the many questions involved in conceptualizing and measuring inflation. They evaluate the accuracy of COLI, a Cost-of-Goods Index, and a variety of other methodological frameworks as the bases for consumer price construction.
