BPS adds more goods in calculating inflation
BPS adds more goods in calculating inflation
JAKARTA (JP): The Central Bureau of Statistics said yesterday that it will take a greater number of commodities into account in measuring the country's inflation rate.
"Right now we use 220 different commodities in our measurement, but we will include more commodities in 1997-98," the bureau's chief, Sugito, told reporters.
He added that the survey of living costs to collect data on consumption patterns will be conducted every five years instead of ten years as it has been done in the past.
"A five-year interval is considered more adequate to reflect the prevailing changes in the consumption patterns of the people," Soegito said.
He did not elaborate on how many more commodities will be included in the inflation rate calculation.
The bureau said Indonesia's inflation last year reached 9.24 percent, while its economic growth rose by seven percent.
Sugito explained that to measure the inflation rate, the bureau takes into account the price developments of various commodities in the capital cities of the country's 27 provinces.
The prices of those commodities -- usually grouped under foodstuff, housing, clothing and services -- are subsequently indexed under a concept called Consumer Price Index (CPI) using the total number of households in each of the capital cities as the weights.
The CPI for each city is the price index of a group of goods and services consumed by most households in the respective city which is specified by a government survey on cost of living.
Inflation is considered a sensitive issue in Indonesia, where, according to official figures of 1993, 13.6 percent of the total population live below the poverty line.
The poverty line is drawn on the basis of a minimum daily calorie intake of 2,100 and a certain quantity of non-food consumer goods and services.
Both the bureau and the government claim that the bureau's figures are accurate and never produced out of political pressure.
"Counting inflation is a complicated business and it is not that easy to engineer the figures," Sugito said. (hdj)