Price index and inflation formula
Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a statistic used to measure average price of a basket of commonly-used goods and services in a period relative to some base period. The base period price of the basket is marked to 100 and CPI value hovers above or below 100 to reflect whether the average price has increased or decreased over the period. CPI is short for the Consumer Price Index, which is a way to measure inflation in the US economy. CPI is released monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is considered the standard measure by which inflation can be identified.. It is important to note that there are many equations to measure the size of inflation in any given economy. More specifically, the inflation rate is the percentage change in the price index from one period to the preceding one. To calculate it, we can use the following formula. In our example, the inflation rate in 2016 is 14,3% ( i.e. ([114,3-100]/100)x100 ).