Social Responsibility
PROVIDING INFLATION SERIES TO POLICYMAKERS
Since early 2020, PriceStats indicators were provided for free to central banks to help them navigate the negative economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of May 2022, these indicators were being provided to 16 central banks throughout the world.
Additionally, starting in May 2022, the PriceStats Global Food Inflation series was distributed to the public on a complimentary basis via our partnership with State Street. This allowed us to help policymakers deal with rapidly rising food prices and supply shortages driven by the war in Ukraine.
Click here to see the press release
OFFERING RAW DATA TO STATISTICAL OFFICES FOR FREE DURING THE CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) PANDEMIC
In an effort to help during the Coronavirus crisis, PriceStats decided to help by offering item-level data to statistical offices for free. We provided our data free-of-charge to the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics and the Central Statistics Office of Ireland for nine months to alleviate their needs to gather prices in supermarkets and other retail stores in the context of extended lockdowns and severe restrictions to going outside.
The World Bank
The World Bank featured PriceStats and The Billion Prices Project as a case study in its 2014 report on big data and its potential impact in the development sector. In the report, Alberto explains his motivation for beginning the Billion Prices Project, how the data is generated & interpreted, and how the information can be implemented.
Massachusetts Council on Economic Education
In June 2013, Pilar presented at a professional development program for teachers put on by the Massachusetts Council on Economic Education (MCEE) and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This program targeted teachers using statistics in both finance and economic classes. Pilar discussed how PriceStats’ use of online data to develop global, real-time economic statistics can be used by both businesses and policy makers.
The professional development program also featured Charles Wheelan, author of Naked Economics—Undressing the Dismal Science and Naked Statistics—Stripping the Dread from the Data, a hands-on workshop, and a presentation on how to incorporate basic statistics into classes.
Click here to see the June 2013 MCEE newsletter
United Nations Global Pulse
In 2011-12, PriceStats participated in the UN Global Pulse, an initiative that aims at leveraging innovative technologies and data sources to track international development in real-time. The Global Pulse team is confident that the analysis of social media and other sources of Big Data represent an untapped opportunity to improve targeting of policies and programs to help communities in need.
The first phase of this initiative included research collaboration with six firms currently using innovative data sets for private purposes (Crimson Hexagon, PriceStats, Jana, SAS, and a consortium of French centers led by the Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France & IFRIS). Results from the initial series of projects have underlined several promising approaches for real-time monitoring of unemployment and food security.
The collaboration between PriceStats and Global Pulse focused on the construction of a daily bread price index for six major Latin American countries. The findings illustrate how the online retail prices reveal offline street price changes weeks before official numbers were able to reflect the inflation, potentially allowing policy makers to better prepare for the negative effect on consumers.
Click here to visit the UN Global
Pulse website
Click here for more information about the Bread Series