Methods, reliability and sources

Abstract

There is every reason for attempting as far as possible to put together an acceptable index figure for rice prices (1.2) for the rapidly evolving period of Indonesian economic history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is, after all, not going too far to say that the comparability of the available statistical material expressed in terms of money depends on the reliability of this index. For this reason, it is appropriate, adding to the details of the price formations of the commodity in 1.3, 1.4 and Chapter 2, to go into more technical detail here than in other volumes in ‘Changing Economy in Indonesia’. This chapter accordingly contains a somewhat more extensive explanation of the manner in which the index figures for 1846–1940 were constructed and of the motives for choosing the time series used, as well as the way in which the reliability of the result has been tested and how the risk of deviations may be determined.