Purpose

The principal purpose of the Producer and International Trade Price Indexes is to measure price change by industry to support the compilation of the Australian National Accounts and the Balance of Payments.  This requires that their compilation be on a basis coherent with the frameworks underlying those statistics (Australian System of National Accounts and Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual Sixth Edition, 2008) and informs many aspects of the current methodology of both the Producer and International Trade Price Indexes.

In the compilation of the Australian National Accounts and the Balance of Payments, components of the Producer and International Trade Price Indexes are primarily used as deflators to produce Chain Volume Measures.

The Producer and International Trade Price Indexes are also used:

• as an indicator of inflation
• for a variety of indexation purposes
• for economic monitoring and comparison by international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).