Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics or BBS has planned to rebase the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Producer Price Index (PPI), Wage Rate Index (WRI) and Index of Industrial Production (IIP) under its Statistical Capacity Enhancement and Modernisation Project.
People familiar with the matter have said the economy has diversified significantly in recent years, with new products, industries and services making larger contributions to economic activity.
They said that updating the indicators would make them more representative and accurate.
“The government wants to produce quality data and ensure data governance,” says a senior official of the BBS’s national accounting wing.
CPI, which is used to measure inflation, is the most closely watched of the four because of its implications for households, businesses, monetary policy, and investment decisions.
The agency plans to collect much of the information for the new CPI through computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). WRI is also expected to use CAPI-based data collection.
It is considering January or later of the current fiscal year as the starting point for the new CPI and WRI series.
And PPI and IIP under the revised methodology could be released from June 2027.
The CPI basket is also likely to undergo significant changes.
The existing basket is based largely on consumption information from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey or HIES.
Some goods and services included in the basket may no longer have sufficiently broad consumption, particularly where their use or consumption is concentrated in specific regions or among limited groups of consumers.
The BBS authorities, therefore, plan to remove less-representative items and introduce products and services that better capture current consumption patterns.
The PPI, which tracks changes in prices received by producers and provides an important measure of upstream inflationary pressure, also needs updating as the production base has expanded and diversified.
Meanwhile, IIP is an important indicator of industrial activity and is used in assessing broader economic performance, including GDP trends.
Updating its composition would help the index better capture changes in industrial production.
The rebasing comes as the BBS separately prepares to revise the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) estimates.
The agency has already begun work to rebase GDP from FY2025-26, with several surveys being under way to bring previously under-measured economic activities into the national accounts.
The broader effort reflects BBS’s push to modernise statistical production, widen data coverage and make economic indicators more closely aligned with the structure of the country’s changing economy.