US CONSUMER PRICE INDEX IN THE PERIOD OF TWO WORLD WARS: HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT OF PRACTICE AND THEORETICAL CONCEPTS
The dynamics of prices in the consumer market is one of the important indicators of market processes and the state of the national economy, therefore the representativity and credibility of the consumer price index (CPI) should be provided by the appropriately elaborated calculation methodology, the breadth and validity of data collection and processing principles used. The article studies the history of formation and development of CPI on the basis of statistical, methodological and scientific publications on the US cost of living index, as theoretically the most substantiated and widely discussed in the indicator. The selected period - allows you to see the dynamics of the methodology for calculating the analyzed indicator, and in the information structure corresponding to the stages of data collection and calculation of the CPI of today, helps to compare the historical development of collection and calculation method with its current state. As a result of generalization and structuring of scientific and methodological data on the CPI, the stages of collecting and processing statistical information in the years 1910-1945 were formalized, which formed the basis for the international standard on consumer price statistics. The US experience is a guide to improve the CPI calculation methods that exist today in national economies.
Keywords: consumer price index, cost of living index, consumer price statistics, cost of living, bulletins of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, true cost of living index of Konusa, monitoring of household budgets.
Highlights:
♦ the methodology for collection and processing of statistical information in order to calculate the CPI on the basis of provisions developed by the Federal Service of Statistics is identified;
♦ within the framework of each stage, information on the dynamics of methodological provisions for calculating the US cost of living index for the period from 1910 to 1945 is summarized;
♦ the comparison of the methodology used to calculate the period under review and Rosstat current developments concerning collection and processing of information on the dynamics of consumer prices is carried out.
Maria A. Kozlova, Candidate of Economics, Associate Professor of the Department of Statistics, Econometrics and Informatics, Ural State University of Economics, Yekaterinburg.