PRIMA is a set of flexible price index tools that can be used for a variety of index systems including consumer, producer, and wholesale price indices. It can also be used for the preparation of production indices for industry, agriculture, etc. PRIMA is being used at the Ghana Statistical Service, Bank of Ghana, Maldives Ministry of Planning and Development, Malawi National Statistical Office and Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics. The system consists of three modules:
- Data entry (specific to each country and type of index) modules developed for desktop, handheld (PDA), and PDF modes.
- Indexer common module integrated with desktop data entry modules
- Online Analytical (and tabulation) module.
The
data entry module is the only customized component of the PRIMA system. Each country and type of index (CPI, PPI, etc.) has its own regional and item hierararchy whose data capture is best done on a customized basis. PRIMA data entry applications are being used in Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Maldives and Uganda.
Data entry can be done in the following modes:
- Desktop application running on one or more networked machines
- PDF (Portable Document Format by Adobe) form files for data entry on desktop computers
- PDA (Portable Digital Assistant or handheld computer) based application for direct data entry in markets/shops. Data is uploaded to the price database using the web.
Some common features of the desktop application being used in the countries mentioned above are:
- Checking and flagging of prices which are too high or low compared with previous period
- Supervisor correction of flagged prices
- Import/Export from/to XML.
Some common features of the PDA based application are:
- Checking and flagging of prices which are too high or low compared with previous period
- Capture on-spot comments explaining high or low prices.
Work is under way to integrate ICP (International Comparison of Prices) standardization.
The common
indexer module is integrated with the data entry module. As opposed to the data entry module which is specific to each country and type of index (CPI, PPI, etc), the indexer handles item and regional hierarchies in a standard way. Each machine on the local area network which has the data entry program will have the common indexer module as well. The indexer module has the following features:
- Compute Standard Laspeyres, Chained Laspeyres and Paasche indices
- Compute hierarchical aggregate indices in a flexible way by importing the structure from independant weight files
- Archive and retrieve indices
- Export index to .DBF format
- Up to 8 levels of aggregation with ITEM level being the lowest one
- Up to 8 weight columns per weight structure.