How are PPIs weighted?
To improve the precision of PPI estimates of price change, sampled items are weighted by a measure of their size and importance. In the first stage of PPI computation, price indexes are constructed for narrowly-defined goods or services. The individual items included in these indexes are weighted by the establishment’s revenue for the product line. In the second stage of PPI computation, indexes for individual goods and services are combined into aggregate indexes. Data for weighting together the product-line indexes comes primarily from the economic censuses of the Bureau of Census. These weights are changed every 5 years. The weights for combining product-line indexes into aggregate indexes are somewhat different for each of the three types of aggregate indexes. For industry net output indexes, product-line weights are the value of shipments from establishments in the industry primarily engaged in the production of the product to establishments outside of the industry. For the tradit
