Export and import price indices are useful instruments in international economics. In international macroeconomics, they can be used to analyse terms of trade, inflation or volume/price elasticity in open economies. In international trade analysis, price indices allow to deflate trade values in order to obtain volumes. CEPII aims at providing aggregated and sectoral trade price indices for all countries of the world. These indices are computed using unit values given by BACI, the CEPII database of international trade at the product-level covering the period 1996-2004.

The rich country dimension of BACI is particularly useful for international comparisons of prices evolutions. Indeed, methodology employed by national statistical institutions to compute price indices often differ and prevent any type of cross-country analysis. For instance, the BLS (American Bureau of Labor Statistics) gives Laspeyres type indices of US exports and imports observed prices whereas the INSEE (French national statistical institute) provides Paasche type indices built on French trade unit values. The United Nations and the IMF provide cross-country comparable Laspeyres price indices releasing export and import unit value indices at the aggregate level. However, Laspeyres indices are not necessarily the more appropriate to all studies (for instance, they can over-estimate the actual price changes). Moreover, UN and IMF provide price indices for only 44 countries excluding then a lot of developing countries. Finally, there is no disaggregated trade indices allowing an international comparison.

The objective of this work is to fill this gap computing “common” Laspeyres and Paasche indices but also “superlative” Fisher and Tornqvist indices, all of this in their chained as well fixed-base forms. The chained Laspeyres and Paasche are calculated as well in their geometric form. Users will be then able to choose the most relevant among an array of indices. An exhaustive sensitivity analysis is done in order to determine the “best” way to deal with many technical difficulties as the treatment of measurement errors in bilateral unit values. Sectoral trade price indices will be provided in different product classifications. In addition to the CEPII working paper describing in detail the methodology, the SAS programs is downloadable making the CEPII trade price indices very transparent and flexible.

Users of  CEPII international trade unit values indices are pleased to cite the forthcoming reference document : Gaulier, Martin, Méjean et Zignago. (2008), "International Trade Price  Indices", CEPII Working Paper N°2008-10, June 2008.

We provide the following five datasets for trade unit values indices. Country codes are available at : http://www.cepii.fr/anglaisgraph/bdd/baci/non_restrict/geo.asp .

The programs to create the TradePrices databases are organised as follow. The master program TradePrices specifies the different paths and includes the subprograms. Namely, the subprograms are: the baci_isic program creating the database from dowloadable BACI data, the outlier program dealing with the treatment of outliers in the table, and 5 other programs computing the different indices.  Thus there are 8 programs working together:

• Master program: TradePrices.sas
• Program to create the base: baci_isic.sas
• Program to treat the outliers: outliers.sas
• Program to compute Laspeyres and geometric Laspeyres indices: l_gl.sas
• Program to compute chained Laspeyres and geometric Laspeyres indices: cl_cgl.sas
• Program to compute Paasche and geometric Paasche indices: p_gp.sas
• Program to compute chained Paasche and geometric Paasche indices: cp_cgp.sas
• Program to compute Fisher and Tornqvist indices in their simple and chained forms: f_cf_t_ct.sas