The Statistical Institute of Jamaica has launched its revised Consumer Price Index series, with a new basket of goods now containing 482 commodities against 231 in the earlier series.

Statin launched the revised basket Friday.

The series is now based on a new system called the classification of individual consumption according to purpose (COICOP).

This is used to group the items and provides a multiple stage computation of the consumer price index.

With the revision of the basket of goods, the rate of inflation for the month of August now stands at 0.9 per cent.

This represents a decline in the rate recorded for the month of July of 1.1 per cent, but is significantly higher than the matching August 2006 period, when prices grew by 0.3 per cent.

Within the COICOP, the subgroups have now moved from eight to 12, with the newly added subgroups being communication, recreation and culture, education, and restaurants and hotels.

The revision comes in light of significant changes in consumer expenditure patterns, consumer tastes and preferences, income levels, advancement in tech-nology, growth in real income per capita, as well as the introduction of new products.

It also removed those products that are obsolete.

DVD players, vegetarian food, computers, cellular phones, microwaves, visa fees and funeral expenses are some of the newly incorporated items.

The revised series is based on the household expenditure survey conducted for the year 2004/05.

A sample size of 12,000 households was used in the survey and was conducted over a 10-month period to reflect seasonality pattern. It took into consideration the effect of Hurricane Ivan, which interrupted the conduct of the survey.

There are also changes with respect to names in the regional indices: the KMA is now being referred to as GKMA, and the reference to Other Towns has been changed to Other Urban Centres.

The indices will now include an all-income national index to reflect a combination of the lower-middle and upper-income indices.

The revision of the CPI series was done in collaboration with major users of the data, which assisted by way of providing technical expertise and funding.

It was conducted on a budget of $78 million, of which the Inter-American Development Bank provided $31 million, Bank of Jamaica $30 million, with the rest financed by the Government of Jamaica/Statin.

sabrina.gordon@gleanerjm.com