The Singapore Department of Statistics compiles the following producer and international trade price indices on a monthly basis:
i)
Singapore Manufactured Products Price Index (SMPPI) which measures the changes in the prices of goods produced by our local manufacturers for sale in the local and international markets.
ii)
Import Price Index (IPI) which tracks changes in the prices of goods imported into Singapore.
iii)
Export Price Index (EPI) which measures changes in the prices of goods exported out of Singapore.
iv)
Domestic Supply Price Index (DSPI), a composite index, for monitoring the price trends of goods used in the domestic economy i.e. locally manufactured goods and imports which are retained for use in the domestic economy.
The first series of the IPI, SMPPI and DSPI were officially released in 1974 followed by the first publication of the EPI in 1978.
The commodities covered under the four price indices are classified according to the Standard International Trade Classification. Each price index is a weighted average of the changes in the prices of a fixed basket of commodities. The basket of goods is reviewed at regular intervals to ensure that the commodities selected are representative of international trade/local manufacturing activities. Each month, prices of approximately 6,000 product items are collected from over 3,000 companies to calculate the IPI, EPI and SMPPI.
Information on the compilation methodology of these price indices is available from the following articles:
The four price indices are used for deflating the National Accounts to estimate the real growth of the economy.
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SMPPI is a price deflator of manufacturing output and is used in the compilation of the Index of Industrial Production.
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IPI and EPI are important indices in their rights. They are also used to deflate external trade values to obtain trade volume or real trade adjusted for inflation. The import volume and export volume are first derived by dividing total import values and total export values by IPI and EPI respectively. The trade volume is then compiled by summing up the import volume and export volume.
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DSPI and EPI are used as price deflators of wholesale trade which consists of two separate components – domestic wholesale trade and foreign wholesale trade.
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DSPI is also used to monitor short term inflationary trends of the economy.
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