Discussion forum for the Price Index Processor Software

Carsten

I hope to have a look at applying this software for SPPI over the coming months.

Niall

Am just testing the comment facility. Looks very useful

I am happy to see the CPI System (PIPS) online now with the possibility of further development. We have been using it in St Lucia for the past two year and want to participate in the further development and improvement of this software.

I'm Makame from Zanzibar, Tanzania. Working at Zanzibar Institute of Financial Administration,and I'm helping The Office of chief Government Statistician, Zanzibar to use CPI compiler since 2005. the office now intend to use the system fully after rebasing the weight.

Currently the office is using the system developed inhouse ie excel and visual basic for application running paralal with CPI compiler. The results are very significant equal. however by CPI compiler have alot of tools, such as imputation.

I'm very happy to get the source code, which are very simple to understand and to follow the logic.

The forum is very useful for improvement of compiler.

Just a visit... good job with the site Carsten.

marc

Finally got the time to sign up. I look forward to test the systems soon myself. Well done Carsten and Paul for making the PIPS finally available.   

- Kari

I ran a workshop on using PIPS in October 2009. During that workshop, there were a number of nuances that we discovered when using PIPS. I have added an attachment to this site (click on attachments) with notes on these nuances. You should take note that PIPS is best run in an Office 2003 environment. Special steps must be taken to use the spreadsheet templates when using EXCEL 2007. These are discussed in the notes. 

I spoke with one of the developers of the software about using SQL Server for running PIPS.  He advised that you cannot convert your ACCESS DB to a SQL DB adequately for PIPS to be able to use it. They use different architecture and indexing. You should create your SQL DB from PIPS. You first need to make sure there is direct communication between the PC and the SQL Server. Once this is established, you need to enter the correct information on the System config screen. After clicking the SQL button and making sure you are connected, you must enter the following information in the SQL Server location box:  SERVERNAME\Instance,port# . You then name the DB to be created and click the "create DB" box. This will create a SQL DB that is only populated with the fixed tables such as classifications tables and country tables. This is the DB you can begin to enter outlet, product, and price data. If you already have an ACCESS DB that you have been using, you need to populate the variable tables in the SQL DB by copying the ACCESS tables such as the establishment table (tblEst), the product table (tblProd) and the price data (tblPrice). If you have created a lot of varieties, you may also need to copy this table (tblCountryVCode) too.

Hi All

I understand that the PIPS uses ISIC Rev3.1 but I would rather use ISIC Rev4.0 as we have moved our indices to NaceRev2.  Do you know if this is possible or can PIPS only function using ISIC Rev3.1? 

Niall

Niall, I believe you can download the ISIC excel template, then paste in the NACE to overlay the ISIC, and upload the results to store in the DB.Try it to see if that works.

Paul, Thanks that worked perfectly.

Hi All

We are setting up some test indices using the PIPS but we having some problems entering weights and also making changes to products and adding new products and/or transactions to an existing establishment which already has saved products and transactions against it. I have included relevant detail, in the form of comments from my colleague who i sworking on the setup, below. Any advice on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Niall

______________________________________________________________________________

I went into the establishment from the Create Establishment screen

then clicked on PRODUCT

then entered the establishment weight into the ESTABLISHMENT ASSIGNED WEIGHT line

I then clicked on ADD PRODUCT

then clicked on the radio button and selected my product code from the list

the share is displayed as 100% so I tried to enter my weight here but I got the error message "You can only define weight by entering a share"
when I gave the share a different value and then tried to enter my weight I got the same error message

I clicked on ADD TRANS to add transactions to the product group

then added these to the product group

then entered the % share breakdown given by the establishment. (There were no updates to the weights)

I saved my changes

Once the product/transaction details were saved I went out of the screen and tried to add new transactions to the product group for that establishment or tried to change the transaction details I had saved as follows:

1. I went back to the Create Establishment screen and clicked on product on bottom right corner and got the error: "error type mismatch 13"2. I went to the screen which lists the Establishments and I clicked on my establishment. I then right clicked with the mouse and selected Edit Product and got the same error: "error type mismatch 13"

Regarding the shares, they must be entered as a decimal, e.g., 0.2 is 20 percent.

When going back to the establishment screen after saving in the product screen, try using the "refresh" button before visiting the same establishment again. This updates the screen so that you have the information you just saved. Otherwise, it is going back to a screen generated before you made the updates.

Hi, this is Ricky Ho from Statistics New Zealand. We're currently assisting Tokelau in setting up a CPI and have been investigating the PIPS as a possible tool for Tokelau to compile the index on an ongoing basis.

Thank you Carsten for pointing me to this forum and also to Gangti for answering my initial question.

The Tokelau CPI is going to be a quarterly release. It appears the software is designed for a monthly CPI by default. I have not been able to find any options to select the frequency. Gangti pointed out that although the software defaults to monthly indexes, it is able to handle different frequencies by simply entering quarterly data values.

However, I am not sure how this works in practice, as the software requires the user to select a compilation date before an index can be compiled.

There may also be an issue during the pre-compilation data check stage, where current period data values are compared with the previous period (and the periods as I understand are monthly frequency by default).

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Ricky.

One country testing PIPS is compiling their CPI quarterly. They collect the data around the 15th of Feb., May, Aug., and Nov. During the off-cycle months, they simply repeat the previous price so there is now index change off cycle. PIPS does not have a publication module, so the stats office simply outputs the time series report to Excel and picks up the on-cycle indexes for publication. I hope this helps you.

Please note that Zanzibar (Mr. Iddi Makame) and the East Africa Regional Technical Assistance Center (East AFRITAC, Dr. Shelly Winston) have provide a Field Manual that many will find useful for using with PIPS. I posted this Manual at the request of East AFRITAC because I seem to have faster upload speeds than those in Eastern Africa. It appears as attachment 3. Just click on "attachments" at the top of this discusssion page.

Thanks for your quick response Paul. Could I ask a couple of other
questions:

• The PIPS uses the Jevons formula at the elementary aggregate level and it
  appears Dutot is not option that can be selected (it is greyed out in the
  system config screen).

The ILO recommends that Jevons be adopted where possible. It also states
that in some instances Dutot is the preferred formula - where there is
little possibility for substitution (eg local authority rates), or where
individual prices may become zero or near zero through subsidies for
example (since the geometric mean becomes zero).

Is there any way to enable the Dutot option?

• After the outlets and products have been set up, I was attempting to
  enter prices for the base period and the current period. However, at the
  Price Input screen, all the data fields are greyed out so I am prevented
  from entering any prices. I made sure that the varieties are set to Active
  in the Edit Product step. I have also tried using the Excel method for
  loading prices but still no luck.

Ricky.

Ricky, if there is perfect homogeneity then the Jevons and Dutot give the same answer. IMF decided to drop the Dutot option because some users may ignore the issue. So you do not have the option to use Dutot.

For data entry, you need the outlet, prices, varieties and then prices. It sounds like you have not set up the varieties within the products. Also, make sure the compilation date is set correctly for the time period you are using.

I found another wrinkle with the PIPS variety coding. The codes should only contain letters and not numbers. I have found that when numbers are used in the variety code, the uitility that sets the global item weight redistribution will not distribute a weight to observations with number in the variety code. A number of people have noted that the weights do not get totally distributed and I believe it is due to this situaiton.

I found a problem in the CPI aggregations for compiling indexes. In the aggregation structure, Food is coded at a level 4 and Non-alcoholic beverages is coded as level 5. Because of this the Food aggregate is the same as Food and Non-alcoholic beverages. One needs to make several changes to Access DB tables as follows:

1. In tblItemWeight change ItemCode 11.01.20 to 11.01.2
2. In tblICPSPD change fields as noted: in line ID 4: Ccode 01.1, CTitle Food
3. In tblICPSPD change fields as noted: in line 189: Ocode 11.01.2, Digit 4, and Ccode 01.2
4. In tblIPC change fields as noted: in line ID 189: Ocode 11.01.2, Digit 4, and Ccode 01.2

This should resolve the problem, so that when you compile the index you get a separtate, correct aggregation for Food.

I tried to download the PIPS software, but I couldnot. Perhaps the problem is related to my computer setting by the administration her in Khartoum. Any way it would be a good software. Iwill into possibilties of downloading it.

M.Bawuor

Dear Marial Bawuor. As far as I can see there is no problem in downloading the software here, so it is probably something with your setup - for example you firewall, if you are not allowed to download program (.exe) files or there may be a limit on the size of the files you can download. My first advice would be to talk with your IT persons. If there is still a problem we could perhaps send the files to you on a CD.

Carsten

I have added attachment 4 which shows Edwin St. Catherine's attempts (St. Lucia) to create the PIPS DB in SQL Express. SQL Express is available as a free download and runs much faster than ACCESS. The DB creation in the attachment was not 100% and if any IT folks out there have an interest, we would really appreciate you having a look at this to see if you can provide additional guidance.

My name is amour H. bakari from Zanzibar. we had piloted the system for about one year ago. And we plan to fully utilize soon when we constructing the new CPI weights.

Last week we had a minor problem on compilation, however we identify the problem. Mr. Iddi, he is working on the issue

CARTAC is using PIPS widely in the Caribbean. We have a contract with a software developer to prepare a transfer facility from an Access DB to a SQL DB. We will also make PIPS compatible with Office 2007 and Windows 7. We hope to have these improvements available by the end of October 2010. We are currently testing an upgraded version (3.1.2) of PIPS and a beta version of the transfer facility.

Dear all, Soon zanzibar we will start using the system, therefore, please let we know those changes and we are happy to receive the new version

Upgraded version of PIPS (version 3.1.1) is available. Please document 4 of attachments for commentary on this new version.

Upgraded versions of PIPs are available. See the documentation on Downloading the CPI PIPS. It also contains some information on areas for future PIPS development if reasources for software updates can be secured.