European Food Prices Monitoring Tool
On 28 October 2009 the European Commission published a Communication on 'A better functioning food supply chain in Europe'.
Among other challenges identified in this communication, the Commission seeks to 'increase transparency along the food supply chain to encourage competition and improve its resilience to price volatility'. One step towards increased transparency is the creation of a European food prices monitoring tool.
In parallel to the Commission Communication, Eurostat is publishing a first version of such a tool, putting together data collected by Eurostat and National Statistical Offices. The primary aim of this tool is to bring together the available data on price developments in the different steps of the supply chain, comparing price developments for the relevant agricultural commodities, for the relevant food industries as well as for the chosen consumer goods.
Some new and additional data has been collected and included in the monitoring tool a set of 8 more detailed HICP indices provided by the NSIs for this purpose.
More information about this new monitoring tool can be found here.
The Food supply chain (FSC) tool itself is directly accessible through the links below:
Access to food price data via the Eurostat database can be found here.
During 2008 Eurostat and National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) have been carrying out a pilot project to investigate the possibilities for the provision of data on price levels for a number of consumer goods and services. This would be an extension to existing work on price statistics that includes the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) and Purchasing Power Parities (PPP). Both HICPs and PPPs are compiled as index numbers. Those two statistics show, respectively, aggregate data on the development of price levels over time and comparisons of price levels across countries.
This new project aims to present indicative price levels for specific groups of products as an additional set of price data. It is by no means a replacement for the measurement of inflation (HICP) or international price level comparisons (PPPs). This report provides the first experimental results from the research work and explains the strengths and limitations of those results. It must be stressed that the results provided in this report do not necessarily represent national average prices - they are indicative price levels for those product groups that consumers usually or typically buy nationally.
Further research on the use of HICP, PPP and other alternative data sources will be needed to be able to make the best decisions for the medium-term on how to make available detailed data on price levels and, during 2009, Eurostat and the NSIs will review all options for the future provision of detailed prices data.
