Consumer Price Index to no longer include Lincoln data

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has stopped collecting price data in Lincoln that's used to help calculate the nation's inflation rate.

The consumer price index, or CPI, measures the change in average prices that consumers pay for everyday goods and services. Data is collected for the index by recording the prices of goods, like food and cars, and services, like housing and medical care, from around 23,000 retailers and service providers in 75 urban areas.

On Wednesday, the department announced that CPI data collection had been suspended in April in both Lincoln and Provo, Utah. In June, data collection was suspended in Buffalo, New York.

Ernie Goss, an economist at Omaha’s Creighton University, said the loss of data could lead to less-accurate economic forecasts.

“It’s certainly not good news for economists,” Goss said. “With cutbacks like this, your sample gets smaller, and with a smaller sample, your margin of error gets larger.”

A statement from the agency said the bureau “makes reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort.”

“These actions have minimal impact on the overall all-items CPI-U index, but they may increase the volatility of subnational or item-specific indexes,” the statement said.

The CPI-U index is the national measure for all urban areas. The bureau also provides data breakdowns by region and by item, which it said are more likely to be impacted by the lack of data in the three cities.

Goss said he isn’t convinced that the degradation in data quality will be limited to more specialized breakdowns. He said the CPI-U is likely to become less accurate as a result, too.

“Your data is likely to become not only a smaller sample size, but also less representative of the nation as a whole,” Goss said. “That’s a much bigger problem, that your sample size may be less representative of the urban areas of the U.S. than it was previous to this cutback.”