The necessities of updating the weights of the commodity basket constituting the consumer price index for the year 2012 in Iraq

Abstract

The consumer price indices in Iraq have gone through many base years, the last of which was the base year 2012, which is used to calculate the number to measure so far. Therefore, it is increasingly important to reconsider calculating the rigid consumer basket for years, by reassessing the relative importance of its components and inserting  new items that have become a major part f    rom the spending of the Iraqi family as a paragraph (personal loans, for example), the research problem (Is introducing new components to the commodity basket and rearranging their priorities important in order to provide new indicators of poverty and changes in prices, wages or income?), The hypothesis of research (the presence of factors affecting spending The consumer, which is reflected in the price index, and therefore the current model does not accurately reflect the reality of consumer spending), the research aims to identify the models of the commodity basket for the consumer and study them well in order to present a proposed model to update the weights of the commodity basket for the Iraqi consumer within the framework of the existing models for selected base years and analyze the factors Affecting consumer spending behavior, which in turn reflects consumer spending according to the developments of the Iraqi economy.

The research concluded that the existing model includes many shortcomings that do not make it valid for expressing the reality of inflation. The research recommended the need to follow a model that takes into account the weights of the current consumer spending components of the consumer.