Sports doctor visits, smartphone repair and intelligent audio equipment enter the list of products that make up the Istat reference basket for the survey of consumer prices.
Methodology
By communicating the changes, Istat reports that for the2023 update the most relevant innovations are of a methodological nature and concern the use of new automatic capture techniques (web scraping) of air transport prices and the use of the IQVIA database for pharmaceutical products, to the advantage of the efficiency of the detection and accuracy of index estimates for these products.
Istat Basket 2023: the new entries
The changes to the basket also see the entry of products such as wild-caught tuna and farmed turbot, walkers and beauty massages (for beauty treatments). The range of scanner-detection product aggregates is also expanding, in relation to packaged aged cheeses, fresh fruit and vegetables (limited to non-seasonal products sold at a fixed weight).
In the 2023 basket used to calculate the indices NIC (for the entire national community) e WAS (for blue- and white-collar households) there are 1,885 basic products (1,772 in 2022), grouped into 1,061 products, in turn grouped into 423 aggregates. For calculating the index IPCA (harmonised at European level) the basket includes 1,906 elementary products (1,792 in 2022), grouped into 1,080 products and 427 aggregates.
Numbers
Istat recalls that there are around 33 million price quotations (scanner data) coming every month from large-scale retail trade (GDO), used in 2023 to estimate inflation; 393 thousand are collected in the area by the municipal statistics offices; over 192 thousand from Istat directly or through data providers; finally, there are more than 167,000 quotations from the fuel price database of the Ministry of Economic Development.
With reference to the NIC index, in 2023, the weight of the divisions increased: Accommodation and restaurant services (+1.9 percentage points), Housing, water, electricity and fuel (+0.8 pp) and Recreation, entertainment and culture (+0.7 pp), while that of Food and non-alcoholic beverages (-1.4 points pp), Health services and health expenditure (-0.4 pp) and Alcoholic beverages and tobacco (-0.4 pp) decreased 4pp).
