[OpenSpending] Financial comparisons

Thu Jun 6 15:39:57 UTC 2013

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 <http://okfn.org>

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