Abstract
The aim of our research is to explore the possibility of utilizing scanner data on pasta purchases to build bilateral and multilateral spatial price indexes, taking a binary approach in the latter.
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Notes
- 1.
This research was funded by PRIN 2005. The Authors thank participants in the International Workshop on Price Index Numbers in Time and Space, held in Florence, September 29th 2008, for useful comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not involve the responsibility of the Bank of Italy.
- 2.
Empirical evidence of regional PPPs at a more aggregated level can be found in De Carli (2008).
- 3.
Comparability depends on the way of defining each product, as ‘product’ can cover a large variety of types depending on various characteristics, such as raw materials used, weight, and packaging, all of which affect price. A product must have the same characteristics in order to be strictly comparable over the different areas (Biggeri, Brunetti, & Laureti, 2008).
- 4.
Representative products are defined here as products that are purchased in relatively large quantities in a country (Hill, 2008).
- 5.
If ten brands are involved, as in a study we subsequently developed, the consumption coverage grows on average to 92 percent, for example at December 2002, for all Italian regions. However, the increases show considerable differences between regions: the average increase in coverage passing from five to ten brands is about 11 percentage points, with a maximum of about 21 percentage points in Campania and a minimum in Trentino A.A. of about 5 percent.
- 6.
Gini proposed this method long before the others, so EKS should in fact be termed GEKS and we therefore adopt this acronym.
- 7.
Transitivity requires that the application of a formula to make a direct comparison between j and k countries should result in the same numerical measure as an indirect comparison between j and k through a link country m (ILO et al., 2004).
- 8.
This property requires that any set of multilateral comparisons satisfying the transitivity property should retain the essential features of the binary comparisons constructed without the transitivity requirement (ILO et al., 2004).
- 9.
Due to space restraints, only results for July 2006 are given.
References
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Acknowledgments
Data have been kindly provided by CEIS of Tor Vergata University of Rome, whose Chief manager, Prof. Giovanni Tria, we would like to warmly thank.
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Carbonaro, I., Santioni, R., Carlucci, M. (2010). Price Dispersion: The Case of “Pasta”. In: Biggeri, L., Ferrari, G. (eds) Price Indexes in Time and Space. Contributions to Statistics. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2140-6_8
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