A New Regional Price Index for Côte d'Ivoire using Data from the International Comparisons Project

This paper develops a regional price index for Cote d'lvoire building on the strengths of two independent data sources -- the Living Standards Survey and the International Comparisons Project. The latter collected a wealth of information on prices across the country but did not collect any information on expenditure patterns of households or other socio-economic data. The former collected detailed information on household incomes, expenditure, employ ment, etc., but its coverage of prices left much to be desired. We bring these two sources together to produce a regional price index that we would argue to be superior to previous estimates based solely on the Living Standards Survey. The procedures we followed will be of interest to practitioners faced with similar data shortcomings, particularly when working on Africa. But we also show that this is no mere statistical exercise - using the new price index can have a significant effect on evaluations of poverty in Cote d'lvoire. We also use the new price information to construct disaggregated indices by commodity category and by poverty group.