Introduction – The Value Chain of Scanner and Web Scraped Data

Abstract

With the advent of scanner and web scraped data, “big data” sources are increasingly finding their way into official statistics. This second part of the special issue on “Big Data and Statistics” is devoted to developments in the use of these data for consumer price indices. To what extent are big data different to more traditional data sources such as the collection of prices in the field, and how do they change the process of producing consumer price indices? The four papers in this special issue address these questions by means of the experiences gained in the statistical offices of France, Sweden and the Netherlands. This introduction puts them into perspective vis-a-vis the value chain of scanner and web scraped data and looks at some further issues for research in this field.