Producer Prices, Product by Product — and Now a Few Broad Sectors

Producer price indexes measure two different sets of prices: what producers receive for what they sell, and what they pay for what they buy. Statistics Canada publishes a range of them, broken out by specific products and industries, which is useful and also very granular — a reading for steel, another for electricity, another for a crop, and so on. The Bank of Canada says that for the first time these series have been combined into a small set of broad sectoral measures. The trade-off is built into the aggregation. A product-level index can tell you which price moved; a sector-level measure gives up that specificity in exchange for a picture of pressure running through a larger slice of the economy. Which one you want depends on whether you are trying to locate a cost shock or describe its breadth.