[open-economics] Financial comparisons

Fri Jun 7 08:45:07 UTC 2013

Hi and thanks for the reply,

On fim 6.jún 2013 19:14, Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen wrote:
> There are multiple official price-indexes all used by government in
> different contexts: consumer-price index, a wage index, netto-prices,
> an index for construction, for road constructions and so on. Parts of
> the budgets are grouped in similar ways. Fx. construction expenses are
> identifiable and these expenses could be adjusted using the
> construction-price-index (same goes for salaries, road-construction
> etc.). This could be a reasonable approach when focusing on a specific
> expenditure post in a historic perspective. However to use different
> price-indexes on different parts of the same budget is obviously
> problematic because the relative size of each type of expenditure
> changes over time.

This brings up another problem of what index to use. I think we can only
infer that from some of our data (not the majority).

> I choose to use a combined consumer-price and wage index to adjust the
> historical data. This is not perfect but I found it better than using
> multiple indexes for different parts of the budget and better than
> presenting figures in real values.

How do you combine them and what do you do when you don't have the
indices for the years your looking at?

I don't want to present the amounts in real values (but I want to store
the real values in the database), I want to present them in "current
nominal value" (what it would cost if I were paying for it with today's
money). The problem is that I don't have the data to compute the current
nominal value (nor the data to compute the real value for all years).

I'm really interested in knowing how you did this with the Danish
municipalities.

-- 

Tryggvi Björgvinsson

Technical Lead, OpenSpending

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