Virtual participation: Zoom details available here
Speaker: Dr Deirdre Toher, Central Statistics Office Ireland
Title: "Measuring Inflation in Ireland"
Abstract: This talk will be an overview of all the different official measures of inflation produced in Ireland.
Many of the sections in the Central Statistics Office that produce inflation measures are responsible for the entire production pipeline – from data collection, verification, analysis, production and dissemination of results, with a rapid turnaround between each collection period. Other sections are responsible for more limited parts of the production pipeline (such as Residential Property or Purchasing Power Parities)
The production pipeline from end-to-end of these measures within the CSO will be explained, including specific data collection issues associated with different inflation measures.
The options for different data sources ranging from survey data, administrative data, web scrapping, commercial data (such as scanner data) will be introduced and some of the issues associated with each and why no “one size fits all” can be applied across all price indexes produced will be explained.
Methods of calculation of price indices will be explained using examples from different price indices produced by the Prices Division of the CSO. This talk will also cover some of the changes introduced to the Wholesale Price Index publication as part of the rebase to 2021, where changes in methodology have been introduced and some of the challenges caused by those changes with discussion about why these changes have been introduced.
Biography: Having completed her PhD. in Statistics from Trinity College Dublin in 2009, Deirdre moved to the UK to be a lecturer / senior lecturer in Statistics in the in the University of the West of England, Bristol. While there, her research focus was as an applied statistician across a wide range of domains, examples of which include research into water consumption behaviour; the robustness of common test statistics; caring responsibilities of young people; guidelines for the usage of nasogastric tubes. She has featured on BBC’s More or Less and has been a Royal Statistical Society Statistics Ambassador since 2014.
She left academia in 2023 to join the Central Statistics Office. Since joining the CSO as a statistician in the Prices Division, she has had responsibility in areas covering Purchasing Power Parities, Import Prices, Producer Prices and Wholesale Prices.