The Impact of Price Adjustment Methods on the Measurement of Economic Performance in Times of Crisis

Different price adjustment methods can yield different real GDP growth rates. While differences are usually small, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing inflation shock caused major shifts in production and consumption components – and thus in the weights used for price adjustment. Using EU National Accounts data (2019-2023), this article examines how sensitive GDP growth rates are to four different price adjustment methods, based on previous-year weights (chain-linking), current-year weights, the Fisher index, and weights from a fixed 2019 base year. GDP growth differs by up to 1.4 percentage points in individual years, with cumulative growth differences reaching 1.8 percentage points.