Improving Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices

forthcoming

Price statistics are needed for monitoring price stability in the euro area and inflation convergence in the EU. The harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP) is the reference indicator for this purpose, and it is used in particular for monetary policy. Since the HICP plays an important role in providing information for economic and monetary policymakers, its quality should be ensured beyond legal requirements. This means incorporating methodological and structural improvements. Therefore, this project will cover possibilities to apply new data sources for HICP compilation, such as web scraping or other automated data collection methods, study possible solutions for combining data scraped from the web with data obtained from other sources, and detect the shrinkflation phenomenon from scanner data. The compilation of the HICP will be based on the Regulation (EU) 2016/792 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 May 2016 on harmonised indices of consumer prices and the house price index and on the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/1148 of 31 July 2020 laying down the methodological and technical specifications.