The price index, a pervasive long established institution for economics, is a number issued by the Statistical Office that should tell anyone the ratio of costs of maintaining a given standard of living in two periods where prices differ.

For a chain of three periods, the product of the ratios for successive pairs must coincide with the ratio for the endpoints. This is the chain consistency required of price indices. A usual supposition is that the index is determined by a formula involving price and quantity data for the two reference periods, always joined with the...

For all those for whom the price index problem remains a source of fascination, this book brings together a coherent discussion of 50 years of work on the 'the Index Number Problem'.