What is consumer price index in Pakistan?

Answer 1

Inflation is an economic phenomenon that touches our lives on daily basis. In fact it is imperative to understand the concept of inflation to plan and manage budget be that of a small household. Inflation is generally defined as the rate at which prices increase in an economy over a period of time. A 'price index' is a measured indicator of the changes in the prices of a 'basket' of goods and services over a given base year.

The Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) of the Government of Pakistan computes inflation using three different indices namely:

i. Consumer Price Index (CPI) also called 'headline inflation' is the main measure of price changes at the retail level. It is used to measure changes in the cost of buying a representative fixed basket of goods and services and indicates the general 'rate of inflation' in the country. CPI was computed for the first time in the cities of Karachi, Lahore and Sialkot. CPI is the most widely used measure of inflation in the world;

ii. Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) is constructed on weekly basis to assess the price movements of essential commodities at short intervals;

iii. Wholesale Price Index (WPI) depicts directional movements of prices for a set of selected items in the primary and wholesale markets. Items covered in the basket of WPI are those which could be precisely defined and are offered in lots by producers / manufacturers.

Prices Indices in Pakistan

(with Common Base Year 2001-01)

Features

CPI

SPI

WPI

Number of cities covered

35

17

18

Number of markets covered

71

53

18

Number of items covered

374

53

425

Number of commodities covered

92

-

106

Number of commodity groups

10

-

5

Number of price quotations

106,216

11,236

1,550

Reporting frequency

Monthly

Weekly

Monthly

Number of income groups

Four

Four

-

Some of the products in the CPI basket have temporary price shocks. Since these shocks can diverge from the overall trend of inflation and give a false measure of inflation, so a subset of CPI called 'core inflation' is used, as an alternate, to reflect the extent of underlying long-term inflation.

Core inflation is calculated by excluding products with volatile and controlled prices from the CPI basket. There are two methods employed by the Pakistan's FBS to calculate core inflation i.e., Trimmed-Mean Inflation (TMI) and Non-Food & Non-Energy (NFNE) inflation.

TMI is computed by three steps:

i. First all the CPI items are arranged in ascending order according to Year-over-Year (YoY) changes in their prices in a given month;

ii. 20% of the items showing extreme changes are excluded i.e., 10% of the items at the top of the list and 10 % at the bottom of the list;

iii. The weighted mean of the price changes of the rest of the items is core inflation.

NFNE inflation is calculated by excluding food group and energy items (kerosene oil, petrol, diesel, CNG, electricity and natural gas) from the CPI basket.

Here is a chart depicting historical CPI-SPI-WPI trends in Pakistan: