Oct 12, 2010

Wanna track inflation? Ask Google, not the government

Via Tyler Cowen:
Google is using its vast database of web shopping data to construct the ‘Google Price Index’ – a daily measure of inflation that could one day provide an alternative to official statistics.Google has not yet decided whether it will publish its index, but "Mr Varian said that the GPI shows a “very clear deflationary trend” for web-traded goods in the US since Christmas." The full article is here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you know that there is already a price index created by ex-Google software engineer available at website Numbeo.com ? It's crowedsourced like wikipedia. It might be interesting to your readers as well.

Pierre-Louis said...

Awesome! thx!