Go to contents
Go to main menu
Go to engine search
top-cross links

Monthly average consumer prices in metropolitan France - Shrimps (1 kg) - Information

Identifier: 000641417

Date of last update: June 12, 2013

Information

Source1 : Insee - Division "Prix à la Consommation"

Consumer price indices and Mean consumer prices

Consumer price indices (CPI)

The CPI covers all goods and market services consumed on French territory by households and non-residents (for example, tourists).

Its theoretical scope is defined as that of actual final monetary consumption expenditure of households.

The CPI is collected through a stratified sample, according to 3 criteria:

  • Geographical criterion: the surveys are conducted in 96 towns with more than 2,000 people, spread over the French mainland, as well as 4 towns in overseas departments. The overseas departments have been included since the set-up of the new CPI 1998 base; the department of Mayotte produces its own index and is not, for the time being, included in the overall index.

  • Type of product: a sample of a little over 1000 product families, called "varieties", is designed to take account of product heterogeneity across items.

    The variety is the basic level for product tracking and calculating the index. The list of varieties is confidential and the CPI is not published at this level.

  • Type of retail outlet: a sample of 27,000 retail outlets, stratified by form of sale, was built to represent the diversity of products and consumers' purchasing methods and to take price variations into account, which are differentiated according to forms of sale.

The CPI is the official measuring instrument for inflation. It allows us to estimate, between two given periods, the average variation in prices of goods and service consumed by households. It is a composite measurement of "pure" price trends, that is, at a constant quality of products consumed.

Retail outlets (eleven forms of sale are distinguished) are the statistical units surveyed. The crossing of these different criteria results in about 160,000 monthly readings.
INSEE has a network of investigators spread over the entire country, who collect the prices every month in the retail outlets. The information is gathered throughout each month by the investigators. The readings are monthly, except for seasonal products, which are collected fortnightly. 40,000 tariffs are also collected centrally.

The sample is updated every year so as to take consumption behaviour trends into account and to introduce new products. Changes to the sample apply to the list and the content of varieties, as well as the breakdown by form of sale and by town.

The CPI is a Laspeyres index, which is chain-linked every year. In addition to the sample selection, the weightings used to aggregate the elementary indices (crossing variety x town) are also annually updated. These weightings represent the share of household consumption covered by the CPI. More particularly, they are obtained from annual series of household consumption within the national accounting system.

Specific processing is carried out for fresh products, other seasonal varieties, tariff varieties and to determine the price trends, at constant quality, when a removed product is replaced in the course of the year by another product.

Promotions and sales offered to all consumers are taken into account.

The first generation of price indices date back to 1914. Over time, the scope of the CPI has widened both geographically and in terms of the population and consumption.

The CPI, 1998 base, is the 7th generation of indices. It covers the entire population and the whole national territory (all major cities and 4 out of 5 overseas departments). It came into force in January 1999.

The CPI of a given month is published monthly around the 13th of the following month, and it is not revised.

Other complementary indicators are published at the same time: the overall index corrected for seasonal variations (CSV), index excluding public tariffs and products with volatile prices, adjusted for tax measures (core inflation), Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), and price indices of mass consumption goods in supermarkets.

Average Prices

The Mean retail prices proposed in the Macroeconomic databank began in January 1992 (12 groupings divided into about 220 detailed series, in Metropolitan France).

In order to calculate the average price of a variety, we use a two-step process:

  • Calculation of an average price unit corrected for the "quality effect", in each town which is surveyed on the variety in question;
  • Aggregation of these average price units by harmonic mean, weighted by the consumption shares of the variety x town crossing. A consumption share is defined by the production of a volume by a price, and the choice of harmonic mean brings it to an actual arithmetic average of the balanced price weighted by the consumed volumes.

This calculation only works for "homogenous" varieties, i.e. grouping together the goods or services which are only slightly different from each other (for example, a baguette).

The average prices which predate January 2002 are average prices in francs, converted into Euros (at a fixed rate of 6.55957).

You can find them in the Bsweb pages, in the macroeconomic database and in the monthly pages of the Consumer Price Index.

A selection of these average prices (120 varieties) is also published for the previous month and the current month, in Excel files which are directly accessible under the consumer price index heading : Detailed monthly indices and average prices for several products (in French only).

Publications

The main publications are the following:

  • The Informations Rapides on the CPI give the main detailed results with a comment,
  • The Informations Rapides on the price index for mass consumption goods in supermarkets are published monthly on the same date, and present the indices by distribution channel for mass consumption goods.
  • Finally, the Informations Rapides on the annual averages of indices is published in January of each year (n+1).
  • Each year, a report on the previous year is published in INSEE Première, as well as in the TEF (French Economy Tables), the ASF (Statistical Directory for France) and FPS (France social portrait).
  • Insee Première themes may also be published from time to time.
  • Publications also exist in each overseas department. They are accessible under the Regions heading on the insee.fr website.

The monthly CPI data, the long series and the methodology elements are presented on INSEE's website Insee.fr. It is possible to download the latest issues of Informations Rapides from the website and the Macroeconomic Databank.

The latest indices to come out and the main figures are also available via Insee's voice server: 09 72 72 20 00 (at a "local calls" price) - 24 hours a day.

Reference texts

  • Art 6 of the ruling of 9 June 1989 on the organisation of the General Management of INSEE:
    [...] the Department of living conditions and retail price draws up the monthly consumer price index [...]
  • Art 51 of Law No. 90-86 of 23 January 1990 laying down various provisions on social security and healthcare: The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies is obliged to publish, every month, a consumer price index where any reference to the price of tobacco is excluded.
  • Art 1 of Law No. 91-32 of 10 January 1991on the fight against smoking and alcoholism (the Evin Law) amended by article 11 of Law No. 92-60 of 18 January 1992 (Neiertz Law): as of 1st January 1992, any reference to a consumer price index to determine a benefit, income, allocation or any other advantage means an index not taking into the account the price of tobacco.
  • Art L141-3: (Law No. 73-4 of 2 January 1973 Official Journal of 3 January 1973 and Law No. 82-957 of 13 November 1982 art. 28, Official Journal of 14 November 1982): indexation of the minimum wage: the purchasing power guarantee for employees whose wages are the lowest is assured by the indexation of the minimum growth wage to the growth in the national consumer price index established as a reference by decree in the Council for ministers after an opinion from the National Commission on Collective Bargaining. Once this index reaches a level which corresponds to at least 2% compared to the index determined when the growth-indexed minimum wage was established immediately before, the growth-indexed minimum wage is increased by the same amount, as of the first day of the month which follows the publication of the index which caused this increase.
  • COUNCIL REGULATION (EC) No. 2494/95 of 23 October 1995 on harmonised consumer price indices.
  • COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No. 2454/97 of 10 December 1997 laying down detailed rules for the implementation of regulation (CE) No. 2494/95 regarding the minimum standards for the quality of HICP weightings.

The basic classification is based on the international COICOP (classification of individual consumption by purpose).

It includes 161 groups and 305 items grouped by consumption function.

The group indices are published on a monthly basis, and for items as an annual average.


Top of the page