Abstract
The period from the end of the Second World War to the close of the 1980s saw the official measure of inflation undergo very significant change. It went from a limited measure, with index households restricted to working-class families, a limited range of goods and services in the basket and utilising weights which were decades out of date, to a modern measure that we would recognise today.
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- 1.
The “basis” of the index is the household budget information used; that is, the set of expenditure weights applied to the corresponding set of price changes for each type of good and service.
- 2.
Note that the technical report was received earlier than this, possibly in January of 1952.
- 3.
- 4.
The Advisory Committee started out reporting to the Ministry of Labour and National Service in 1947. The Ministry was renamed the Ministry of Labour in 1959, then the Department of Employment and Productivity in 1968 and then the Department of Employment in 1970.
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O’Neill, R., Ralph, J., A. Smith, P. (2017). The Development of the Retail Prices Index: 1947–1989. In: Inflation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64125-6_6
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