EXECUTIVE SUMMARY REPORT
INTRODUCTION TO THE PIA
Purpose
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) system is a major application and is the
nation's chief measure of retail price change. The objective of the CPI system
is to measure the average change over time in the prices paid by urban
consumers for a market basket of goods and services. The CPI has three
principal uses: First, as a current measure of inflation, used by both the
private sector and the government; second, as a deflator of other economic
series, such as the national income and product accounts; and third, as a means
of adjusting dollar values, such as Social Security payments.
The CPI is a product of a series of interrelated samples. First, using
data from the latest decennial census, the Bureau selects the urban areas from
which prices are to be collected and chooses the housing units that are
eligible for use in the shelter component of the CPI. The Bureau then uses a
Telephone Point-of-Purchase survey (TPOPS) to determine the places where
households purchase various types of goods and services.
Data from a Consumer Expenditure Survey provides detailed information on
the spending habits of more than 30,000 households. This survey allows the
Bureau to construct the market basket of goods and services and provides the
weighting structure (called cost weights) for each item.
Once all sampling is complete, initiation and pricing take place within
the context of two separate surveys. The Commodities and Services (C&S)
survey is concerned with goods and services. The Housing survey is concerned
with rent of shelter. Information from these two surveys is reviewed, compiled
and published on a monthly basis
PIA APPROACH
A CPI team completed the CPI PIA by evaluating the type of data used by
its systems. Members of the Division of Management Systems assisted with the
assessment.
PIA RESULTS
There are no findings to mitigate.
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