International Monetary Fund

Data cited at: Consumer price indexes, The International Monetary Fund Consumer price indexes (CPIs) are index numbers that measure changes in the prices of goods and services purchased or otherwise acquired by households, which households use directly, or indirectly, to satisfy their own needs and wants. In practice, most CPIs are calculated as weighted averages of the percentage price changes for a specified set, or ‘‘basket’’, of consumer products, the weights reflecting their relative importance in household consumption in some period. CPIs are widely used to index pensions and social security benefits. CPIs are also used to index other payments, such as interest payments or rents, or the prices of bonds. CPIs are also commonly used as a proxy for the general rate of inflation, even though they measure only consumer inflation. They are used by some governments or central banks to set inflation targets for purposes of monetary policy. The price data collected for CPI purposes can also be used to compile other indices, such as the price indices used to deflate household consumption expenditures in national accounts, or the purchasing power parities used to compare real levels of consumption in different countries.

Covering 187 countries including most low-income countries, the toolkit provides indicators on export product diversification and export product quality from 1962-2014. The measures in this toolkit are based on an updated version of the UN–NBER dataset, which harmonizes COMTRADE bilateral trade flow data at the 4-digit SITC (Rev. 1) level. The export diversification and quality database was developed by IMF staff under an IMF-DFID research collaboration. The Export Diversification Database has three main indicators: the Export Diversification Index, the Extensive Margin, and the Intensive Margin. Higher values ​​for the all three indices indicate lower diversification. The Export Quality Database contains export quality measures across different aggregation levels of export products. Higher values ​​for the quality indices indicate higher quality levels.