Replace New Monetary For Nigerians Live In USA

common international standards for producing economic statistics—such as the measures of inflation—are important for the increasingly integrated world economy. This is particularly true for the 27 countries[1] of the European Union (EU) whose economies now are a single market, and it is even more critical for the 17 EU countries[2] of the Eurozone that replaced their own monetary units with the euro. Consequently, the EU requires each member country and prospective member country to produce standardized (harmonized in euro-speak) economic statistics. The EU’s statistical agency, Eurostat, develops the standards in consultation with the statistical agencies of the EU member states.


The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP)[3] is Eurostat’s standard consumer price index. Eurostat chose this name to distinguish the HICP from the old consumer price indexes; many European statistical offices continue to produce their countries’ traditional CPIs for historical continuity and for internal purposes, such as adjusting pensions. These statistical offices now also produce HICPs for their respective countries. Eurostat averages[4] the national HICPs to produce the multinational HICPs, including the European Index of Consumer Prices (EICP), the aggregate HICP for the entire EU. Eurostat also produces average HICPs for other European areas and country groups, such as the Eurozone. Eurostat publishes these HICPs in its monthly press release.[5] The European Central Bank (ECB), the monetary authority that regulates the euro, is a primary user of the HICP. The ECB uses the HICP to formulate Eurozone monetary policy. Some countries outside of Europe also calculate an HICP for the ECB and for their own use. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been producing a US-HICP[6] as an experimental index[7] since 2011.


The U.S. HICP differs from the official U.S. CPI—in two major respects: population coverage and the treatment of owner-occupied housing . The CPI-U’s target population is urban consumers, noninstitutional residents of metropolitan areas and urban places in the United States; their consumption expenditures are the basis for the CPI-U weights. On the other hand, Eurostat specifies that HICP targets a country’s total population: rural as well as urban. BLS was able to expand the population coverage for the US-HICP to the total (noninstitutional) U.S. population, because the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE), which is the source for the CPI weights, covers rural areas. As the CPI does not collect prices in rural areas, the US-HICP uses the price movement of non-metropolitan urban places in each of the four census regions to stand in for rural price change in each region. (BLS was not able to add the institutional population,