Creative and Exhaustive, but Less Practical – a Comment on the Article by Diewert and Fox

The article by Diewert and Fox provides a comprehensive overview of challenges that NSOs face in producing the CPI in pandemic times by touching on many different fields. A focus is on the treatment of missing prices, where they propose different methods depending on the resources available to the NSO. However, some of the procedures proposed can be seen as being less practical like the use of reservation prices (which is also debatable from a theoretical point of view) and of alternative data sources for weights whose implementation supposedly takes longer than the pandemic itself. Overall, the article provides an important contribution for making CPI production more robust for similar crises in the future.