Labor Department says staffing shortages reduced its ability to conduct its massive monthly survey
The BLS will issue the next monthly inflation report on July 15. Excerpts from the article:
"To calculate the inflation rate, hundreds of government workers called enumerators fan out across cities each month to check how much businesses are charging for products such as blue jeans and services such as accounting, often by visiting bricks-and-mortar stores. Statisticians roll those figures together into the consumer-price index, a data stream that shows how the cost of living is changing for typical Americans.
If the government’s enumerators can’t track down a specific price in a given city, they try to make an educated guess based on a close substitute: say, cargo pants instead of slacks. But in April, with fewer workers on hand to check prices, statisticians had to base their guesses on less comparable products or other regions of the country—a process called different-cell imputation—much more often than usual, according to the BLS."
"The BLS said Wednesday that in April it stopped collecting consumer-inflation data in Lincoln, Neb., and Provo, Utah. It also said that it stopped collecting data in Buffalo, N.Y., in June. The BLS said the changes will have “minimal impact on the overall inflation rate,” but might increase volatility for the price data on specific goods and in specific regions."
"“The CPI temporarily reduced the number of outlets and quotes it attempted to collect due to a staffing shortage in certain CPI cities,” beginning in April, the email read. “These procedures will be kept in place until the hiring freeze is lifted, and additional staff can be hired and trained.”"
"29% of price guesses were made using different-cell imputation, almost twice as high as any month in the past five years."
No comments:
Post a Comment