The Year Book.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20448, 19 January 1932, Page 6

The Year Book.

The New Zealand Official Year Book for 1932, which has just been published, is slimmer by 150 pages (a 15 per cent, cut) than its predecessor, but the reader will not detect that at first. It will, however, be observed that there is little new material, but one important revision is worth noticing. Up to 1931, the retail-price index numbers were based on the pre-war household consumption, and 1914 prices were taken as the basis of comparison. New Zealand has now fallen in with the suggestion of the International Labour Office that the year 1930 should be the basis of future calculations. In 1930, 318 household budgets of sufficient accuracy and completeness were collected and from them the distribution of expenditure was freshly calculated. As it happens, habits of household consumption have altered slowly, the only striking change being in the expenditure on food, which has decreased from 34.13 per cent, to 29.52 per cent. Besides this correction for a changed distribution of expenditure, the basis of comparison has been chauged, the average of prices ruling during the flvo years 1926-30 being taken instead of a pre-war average. These changes are useful, for, apart from the fact that most people have given up thinking of things in terms of conditions before the war, the recent investigations seem to have been more thorough than those on which the previous index numbers were based. It is interesting to find, for instance, that the distribution of expenditure waa calculated in 1911 from only 69 household budgets, and in 1919 from 109 budgets. A high degree of accuracy could hardly be expected where the field of investigation is bo small, and even the 318 budgets taken in 1930 will give only a very approximate result. But it is something to feel that we have at last entered on the post-war era.