IndexNumber: An R Package for Measuring the Evolution of Magnitudes

Abstract

Index numbers are descriptive statistical measures useful in economic settings for comparing simple and complex magnitudes registered, usually in two time periods. Although this theory has a large history, it still plays an important role in modern today’s societies where big amounts of economic data are available and need to be analyzed. After a detailed revision on classical index numbers in literature, this paper is focused on the description of the R package IndexNumber with strong capabilities for calculating them. Two of the four real data sets contained in this library are used for illustrating the determination of the index numbers in this work. Graphical tools are also implemented in order to show the time evolution of considered magnitudes simplifying the interpretation of the results.