This is a past event
Dr Jeff Ralph, a senior methodologist at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Royal Statistical Society William Guy Lecturer for 2017-2018 will be giving a presentation about the history of inflation measurement.
Consumer price inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics are among the most influential of all Official Statistics. They are used for a wide variety of important purposes from indicating the health of the economy to the adjustment of pensions and benefits. Behind the numbers sits a sophisticated methodology with a long history of development.
This talk examines five key aspects of the overall history from the start of the 18th Century to the present day. It includes the development of the basket of goods and services from the first known use in 1707 with just a handful of items to the current representative basket containing over seven hundred consumer products and services. The talk also describes the development of measures of household expenditure from the pioneering work of medics and social reformers in the 19th Century to the modern approach of using a detailed household expenditure survey supported by administrative data.
Dr Jeff Ralph worked for the Office for National Statistics for 14 years focussing mainly on price statistics. He is the current Royal Statistical Society William Guy Schools’ Lecturer and a visiting academic at the University of Southampton. Jeff was a member of the Technical Advisory Panel for Consumer Prices for two years and he is joint author of two books - A Practical Introduction to Index Numbers, published by Wiley in 2015 and Inflation: History and Measurement, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.
- Speaker
- Dr Jeff Ralph
- Hosted by
- University of Aberdeen Business School
- Venue
- King's College KQG5