CONSUMER PRICE INDEX FOR URBAN WAGE EARNERS AND CLERICAL WORKERS: An index of prices of goods and services typically purchased by urban wage earners and clerical workers. This carries the official abbreviation CPI-W to distinguish it from its more famous sister index CPI-U, which is the standard Consumer Price Index for All Urban Workers, (commonly abbreviated simply as CPI). Like the standard CPI, the CPI-W is compiled and published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), using price data obtained from an elaborate survey of 25,000 retail outlets and quantity data generated by the Consumer Expenditures Survey.The CPI-W is a continuation of the original CPI developed early in the 1900s to provide cost-of-living adjustment information to wage-earning workers (which is why the Bureau of LABOR Statistics oversees consumer PRICE indexes). Because the original CPI (now CPI-W) was based on goods and services purchased by wage-earning workers, it was replaced by the newer CPI-U in 1978 to provide a broader, more comprehensive measure of the economy's price level. In particular, the newer CPI-U includes the prices of goods and services purchased by about 80 percent of the non-institutionalized population while the older CPI-W includes about only 32 percent. While the CPI-U is the broader, and presumably more accurate, measure of the macroeconomy's price level, the CPI-W is not a bad measure. The two indexes do tend to move in tandem. For example, the more comprehensive CPI-U for December 2003 is 184.3 while the narrower CPI-W has a value of 179.9. Over two decades (from the 1982-84 base period to 2003), the two indexes differed by only 4.4 index points (or 2.5 percent); not perfect, but not too bad, either. Check Out These Related Terms... | Consumer Price Index | Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers | GDP price deflator | Producer Price Index | Wholesale Price Index | CPI and GDP price deflator | Or For A Little Background... | inflation | price level | price index | cost of living | business cycles | business cycle indicators | macroeconomics | macroeconomic goals | macroeconomic problems | production possibilities | gross domestic product | real gross domestic product | nominal gross domestic product | And For Further Study... | deflation | disinflation | inflation problems | inflation causes | demand-pull inflation | cost-push inflation | unemployment rate | Bureau of Labor Statistics | Bureau of Economic Analysis | National Income and Product Accounts | Recommended Citation: CONSUMER PRICE INDEX FOR URBAN WAGE EARNERS AND CLERICAL WORKERS, AmosWEB Encyclonomic WEB*pedia, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: December 16, 2025]. |
