Magazine
Helper Functions for Economic Indexes and Productivity Statistics (303772)
*Michael Jadoo, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Peter Meyer, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Keywords: Tornqvist index; economic index; chain-weight index; expenditure share; productivity statistics
We introduce a package of routines for the R programming language to aid users constructing economic indexes for tracking trends in prices and quantities. For productivity statistics, the Tornqvist index is a standard algorithm to aggregate over products or industries. It uses a changing-weight formula that aggregates variables at two points in time using a cost/expenditure share approach to aggregate price or quantity indexes. The new functions can detect and deal with problematic values in the underlying price and quantity data, such as missing values, zeros, and outliers. We also provide methods of aggregating measures by industry and by a group of assets for an industry sector, and a set of examples to illustrate their use for multifactor productivity statistics.