Seasonal Adjustment Procedures and Price Statistics

The objective of the following study, commissioned by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (Bundesamt für Statistik, BFS), is to present a survey of seasonal adjustment procedures for economic time series reflecting the current state of the art as well as the practical implementation of the analyzed methods in official statistics. In addition to a general discussion of seasonality and the design of seasonal adjustment procedures, the study analyses, in particular, the widely used CESNUS-X-11 procedure. The analysis centers around the suitability of the CENSUS-procedure for adjusting price quotations in Switzerland. This study offers a valuable contribution with the respect to both theoretical and practical issues in the complex topic of time series in price statistics. This study was originally published in German by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office in 1993.