[open-economics] Financial comparisons

Thu Jun 6 16:03:45 UTC 2013

Hi Tryggvi,

How far do you want to go back?

Calculating deflators is not trivial, particularly as baskets are
different and keep changing over time! The standard source for CPI is
from the Penn World Tables. This should give you data running back to
1950.

https://pwt.sas.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php

The variables of interest to you will be the p* variables that give
the price levels.

Guo

On 6 June 2013 16:39, Tryggvi Björgvinsson
<tryggvi.bjorgvinsson at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi all and sorry for crossposting,
>
> I've been working on "amount normalisation" for OpenSpending to allow us to
> do historical comparisons more accurately using real value or look at
> amounts at the current nominal value (I hope I'm using the correct terms).
>
> I decided to use consumer price indexes and I've collected the data from the
> World Bank. The problem with that data is that many years are missing for
> some countries (either the CPI wasn't being collected, isn't being collected
> any more or has never been collected).
>
> Since I don't know how this is usually done I wanted to ask you what you
> think would be the best approach:
>
> 1. Use the index that's nearest in time (this won't be accurate though)
> 2. Interplolate and guess what the index is (not accurate either since it's
> not linear)
> 3. Just say that we can't do historical comparisons nor compute the
> real/nominal value
> 4. Something else
>
> --
>
> Tryggvi Björgvinsson
>
> Technical Lead, OpenSpending
>
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
>
> Empowering through Open Knowledge
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