Import price indexes for crude petroleum, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, November 1982

Import price indexes
for crude petroleum

Edward E. Murphy and Mark McEnearney

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' International Price Program is responsible for calculating import and export price indexes for the United States. These indexes are statistical measures of the average change in prices of commodities that are traded between the United States and the rest of the world.

The program was originally funded by Congress in 1970. Prices indexes were first published for exports in 1971, and for imports, in 1973. As of June 1982, published indexes accounted for 71 percent of the value of exports and 96 percent of the value of imports. Plans for the program include provisions for increasing the share of exports and imports for which indexes are calculated to 100 percent.

This article describes the International Price Program's price index for crude petroleum imports. The index, which was first published in November 1981,¹ is calculated using price and quantity data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy.

This excerpt is from an article published in the November 1982 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes

1 The price index for U.S. imports of crude petroleum from all countries is published quarterly in the BLS press release "U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes." The release is available on request.

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