The description of the CPI commonly adopted by users is in terms of its perceived uses; hence the frequent references to the CPI as a measure of inflation, a measure of changes in purchasing power, or a measure of changes in the cost of living. In practice, the CPI is a measure of changes, over time, in prices of a constant basket of goods and services acquired by metropolitan households in Australia. As such, the CPI has been designed as a general measure of price inflation for the household sector in Australia.
The simplest way of thinking about the CPI is to imagine a basket of goods and services of the kind acquired by Australian households. As prices vary, the total cost of this basket will also vary. The CPI is simply a measure of the changes in the cost of this basket as the prices of items in it change.
The price of the CPI basket in the reference base period is assigned a value of 100.0 and the prices in other periods are expressed as percentages of the price in the base period. For example, if the price of the basket had increased by 35% since the base year, then the index would read 135.0. Similarly, if the price had fallen by 5% since the base year, the index would stand at 95.0.
For practical reasons, the CPI basket cannot include every item bought by households, but it does include all the important kinds of items. It is not necessary to include every item that people buy since many related items are subject to similar price changes. The idea is to select representative items so that the index reflects price changes for a much wider range of goods and services than is actually priced.
From the September quarter 2000 onwards, the total basket is divided into the following 11 major commodity groups: food; alcohol and tobacco; clothing and footwear; housing; household furnishings, supplies and services; health; transportation; communication; recreation; education; and miscellaneous. These groups are in turn divided into 34 subgroups, and the subgroups into 89 expenditure classes.
In addition to the aggregate 'All groups' index, indexes are also compiled and published for each of the groups, subgroups and expenditure classes for each state capital city, Darwin and Canberra. National indexes are constructed as the weighted average of the indexes compiled for each of the eight capital cities.
The 14th Series CPI is the latest of a number of retail price indexes which have been constructed for various purposes by the ABS. The history of retail price indexes in Australia is published in Year Book Australia 1995.
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