The Boskin Commission Report After a Decade: After-life or Requiem?

Abstract

The author provides a political economy interpretation of the rise and fall of public interest in price measurement, placing these developments in the context of the attempt by Congress and the White House to deal with growing deficits in the early to mid-1990s. He provides a detailed discussion of initiatives since the Boskin Commission, such as the National Academy of Sciences panel, to improve CPI measurement. The author examines the thorny issue of the CPI for health care, with particular reference to the Boskin Commission recommendation that BLS move from pricing health care inputs to pricing health care outcomes. He concludes that the BLS has responded constructively to the recommendations from the various price measurement initiatives. By implementing many of the methodological changes suggested, the BLS has reduced net CPI inaccuracy and increased professional confidence in the reliability of the CPI.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.