“Measuring Inflation under Pandemic Conditions”: A Comment

Diewert and Fox (2022) examine various implications of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic for constructing consumer price indexes. The authors state that the pandemic caused major changes in consumption expenditures and shares which makes fixed basket index number formulae inapplicable. They emphasize the need for more frequent surveys of consumer expenditure which will enable compilation of the Fisher index which is considered superior to the traditional Laspeyres or Young indexes. In addition, Diewert and Fox discuss the use of various “new” technologies such as web scraping, scanner data, and information from transactions through credit cards to estimate consumption expenditure.