Open material for price statistics

Published

2025-06-08

Software for official statistics

There are many open-source software packages for official statistics and survey statistics. The two best lists of these packages are:

Eurostat also has a similar list that’s worth exploring:

Although some of the packages on these lists are for computing index numbers (and are enumerated in the next section), there are several complementary tools for, e.g., sampling, seasonal adjustment, that are nonetheless important for price statistics.

The UNECE High-Level Group for the Modernisation of Official Statistics gives a good overview of the role of open-source software in the production official statistics, and can help contextualize the software on these lists.

Software for price statistics

This list is a work in progress

Please let us know about any software packages relevant for price statistics that we missed.

Most software for price statistics is implemented in R, with the remainder in Python. The projects listed here may differ in various aspects, such as maturity level, maintenance status, licensing terms, and more. Users are encouraged to assess whether each open-source tool aligns with their specific requirements. Note that this list is for software packages related to price statistics that are broadly available on, e.g., CRAN or PyPI, not data analysis scripts used to derive a price index. Packages enable efficient code reuse across multiple projects and are more likely to be useful to the broader community.

Open-source software packages for price statistics are split into those for computing index numbers and those to facilitate accessible official statistics. There are also several software papers related to price statistics.

Computing price indexes

Multilaterals and scanner data

Aggregation

Housing

General purpose

Accessing price indexes

Software papers

Older/inactive projects

Reproducibility resources

There are several good resources for how to make data analysis and research projects reproducible. These are not about price statistics per se, but the ideas and tools are broadly applicable to the field. The example of a price-index pipeline shows how these ideas around reproducibility can pair with the software listed above.

General

Reproducible analytical pipelines

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