Recovering historical inflation data from postal stamps prices

Philip Hans Franses and Eva Janssens

No EI2016-33, Econometric Institute Research Papers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute

Abstract: For many developing countries, historical inflation figures are rarely available. We propose a simple method, which aims to recover such figures thereby using prices of postal stamps, issued in earlier years. We illustrate our method for Suriname where annual inflation rates are available for 1961 until 2015, and where fluctuations in inflation rates are prominent. We estimate the inflation rates for the sample 1873 to 1960. Our main finding is that high inflation periods usually last no longer than 2 or 3 years.

Keywords: inflation; postage stamps; price recovery; historical time series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 N10 N16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11
Date: 2016-08-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-mac
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Related works:
Journal Article: Recovering Historical Inflation Data from Postage Stamps Prices (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureir:93332

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