WEB SCRAPING - A SOURCE OF PRICE INFORMATION PARTICIPATION IN THE CALCULATION OF CONSUMER PRICES INDEX

Desislava Zaharieva

Abstract: In recent years the Internet has become an essential part of people's lives and a way of communication between individual institutions, governments, companies and the population. An increasing number of retailers take advantage of the opportunity to offer their goods online. Taking into account the rapid growth of technology, national statistical institutes are looking for new ways of gathering information for statistical surveys. In their quest for innovation and the use of existing data sources, some of the national statistical offices, including the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria, supported by Eurostat through project funding, are are drawn to the web scraping technique to obtain information from the Internet.
Presented in brief are the steps that the Consumer Prices, Housing prices and PPP Department has made in using web scraping technique to obtain information from the Internet on the prices involved in calculating consumer price indices. The advantages and disadvantages of the automatic collection of prices, as well as the conclusions made by the department's experts, are outlined.

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Date published: 2018-09-13