The indexes are produced monthly by the International Price Program (IPP) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"[1] A further study undertaken for NBER by Professors Irving Kravis and Robert Lipsey gave more impetus to the project.
In their study, "Price Competitiveness in World Trade," Kravis and Lipsey outlined the need for such measures and the feasibility of producing them.
Largely as a response to changing international economic conditions and the need on the part of both the Federal Government and the private sector to obtain these data on a more timely basis, collection and publication of international price indexes were begun on a quarterly basis in 1974.
[3] In 2005, the IPP expanded its output of import price indexes based on locality of origin to include France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Pacific Rim, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Asia Near East.
Items for which it is difficult to obtain consistent with time series core comparable products, however, such as works of art, are excluded.
[citation needed] Most of the relevant price data is collected by a fielded survey directed at U.S. importers and exporters.