Wholesale price indexes for United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France, 1790â1940.
Reprinted from A. Burns and W. Mitchell, Measuring Business Cycles; by permission of National Bureau of Economic Research
wholesale price index, measure of changes in the prices charged by manufacturers and wholesalers. Wholesale price indexes measure the changes in commodity prices at a selected stage or stages before goods reach the retail level; the prices may be those charged by manufacturers to wholesalers or by wholesalers to retailers or by some combination of these and other distributors. In the United States, the index measures the price movements of all commodities flowing into primary markets of the United Statesâwhether domestically produced or imported. Primary markets are those in which a good in a given stage of fabrication is first sold in substantial quantities. Because primary markets include goods of all degrees of fabrication, the same commodity is often priced at several stages of processing. Cotton, for example, is priced in the form of raw cotton, cotton yarn, cotton gray goods, cotton piece goods, and cotton clothing.
One of the earliest wholesale price indexes was produced for Great Britain in 1886, covering the period after 1846. The official wholesale price index in the United Kingdom, produced by the Board of Trade, goes back to 1871. In the United States, the first major effort to summarize wholesale price changes through index numbers was published in a report of the U.S. Senate in 1893. The present wholesale price index of the United States, maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been computed for the period since 1890. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, economic historians have attempted to reconstruct wholesale price indexes for the 19th century that are superior to the early efforts.
The number and character of the commodities included in wholesale price indexes vary widely from country to country. In large industrial countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, the commodities that are included usually number in the thousands; but for most countries it is much smaller, often only 100 or 200. The smaller numbers of products will serve well enough if only a general all-commodities index (or a few subindexes at most) is wanted. Greater numbers are required when many subindexes are desired. The United States, for example, publishes indexes for commodities classified according to stage of processing (crude materials, intermediate materials, and finished goods), according to the durability or nondurability of the products, and according to the economic sector for which goods are intended (consumers, producers, etc.). The commodities are also grouped into 15 categories and nearly 100 subgroups (fresh fruits, grains, etc.) and a large number of product classes (apples, bananas, barley, corn, etc.), for each of which monthly price indexes are published. In addition, there are a number of indexes for special commodity groups such as various categories of pharmaceutical preparations. The number of commodities included in the U.S. index has expanded from 250 when the index was started in 1902 to about 2,400 in the late 20th century. The new commodities have tended to be more highly fabricated and to have more stable prices, and they have therefore dampened the fluctuations in the index. One reason for the inclusion of more commodities was a gradual shift in the conception of the function of the index. Originally it was regarded as a measure of movements in the general price level, but as other indexes became available, such as the consumer price index, less reliance was placed on the wholesale price index for this purpose. At the same time, there was a growing demand for subindexes pertaining to particular classes of products for various business and analytical purposes.
Countries in which industrial production is not highly variegated usually have smaller numbers of product classifications; these serve to distinguish between price movements of domestic goods and price movements of imports and between those of food or agricultural products and those of industrial products. Raw materials and standardized products in early processing stages that are easy to price tend to be well represented in the wholesale price indexes of all countries; whereas more complex types of producersâ goods, such as heavy electrical equipment, tend to be underrepresented or omitted even in the indexes of the advanced industrial countries. This is a source of upward bias in the general wholesale indexes since there is reason to believe that technological change has been particularly important in bringing about improvements in complex goods.
Price data used to construct the indexes are usually gathered from business firms by mail, less frequently from trade journals and trade associations, and also from government purchasing agents. Weights are generally based on relative sales volume. Data from censuses of production (manufacturing, mining, agriculture, etc.) are used for weights when they are available.
