Abstract
PurposeThe purpose of this study paper is to focus on developing novel ways to monitor an economy in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. A fully automated framework is proposed for collecting and analyzing online food prices in Poland. This is important, as the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe in 2020 has led many governments to impose lockdowns that have prevented manual price data collection from food outlets. The study primarily addresses whether food price inflation can be accurately measured during the pandemic using only a laptop and Internet connection, without needing to rely on official statistics.Design/methodology/approachThe big data approach was adopted to track food price inflation in Poland. Using the web-scraping technique, daily price information about individual food and non-alcoholic beverage products sold in online stores was gathered.FindingsBased on raw online data, reliable estimates of monthly and annual food inflation were provided about 30 days before final official indexes were published.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to focus on measuring inflation in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Monthly and annual food price inflation are estimated in real time and updated daily, thereby improving previous forecasting solutions with weekly or monthly indicators. Using daily frequency price data deepens understanding of price developments and enables more timely detection of inflation trends, both of which are useful for policymakers and market participants. This study also provides a review of crucial issues regarding inflation that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of developing access to data that allow tracking of an economic situation at a much higher frequency than traditional monthly or quarterly indicators
The main research question of this study addresses whether food price inflation can be accurately measured during the pandemic using only a laptop and an Internet connection, without needing to rely on official statistics
4.5 Future of web-scraped data in measuring food prices During the COVID-19 pandemic, customers shopped more online, and online prices could reflect price trends more accurately than those collected from traditional shops
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of developing access to data that allow tracking of an economic situation at a much higher frequency than traditional monthly or quarterly indicators. As the economic situation under the pandemic was changing rapidly and subject to significant uncertainty, researchers started using a variety of high-frequency indicators, such as mobile phone data, traffic density, web searches, electricity consumption and credit card transactions, rather than “traditional” economic indicators, to take the pulse of an economy almost in real time (Baker et al, 2020; Carvalho et al, 2020; Cicala, 2020; Kuchler et al, 2020). The full terms of this licence may be seen at http:// creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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