Abstract

The study dealt on the generation of the geographic Consumer Price Index (CPI) as a tool for measuring price changes over a period of time of a fixed basket of goods and services commonly consumed by the population. The National Capital Region (NCR) and 1985 were taken as the base region and year, respectively. The market basket and the commodity weights were extracted from the 1985 Family Income and Expenditures Survey of the National Statistics Office. Four methods were followed from Laspeyres and Paasche formulae, with further derivations of the indexes as expressed in price relatives and expenditure weights. The resulting indexes could be interpreted as differences between the current prices in the region with the NCR base year prices or with NCR current prices, for the quantity of commodities consumed in 1985 for NCR or for the region. Generation for the indexes using the four methods was applied on the May 1990 price data. A system operations manual was provided to guide in the production of the GPI series following the suggested methods.