To date, research on the economic history of Brazil during the 19th century has relied on official foreign trade statistics, the accuracy of which has repeatedly been put into question. This paper provides insights into the accuracy of the official series by examining the accuracy of the export and import series for Brazil during the 19th century. We re-estimate the official import series using trading partner sources, and find that the official series was marginally under-valued during certain periods of the 19th century. Furthermore, we provide new upper- and lower-bound estimates of the export series by testing different assumptions regarding the size of the cost, insurance and freight to free on board factor adjustments. Finally, we introduce a new import price index for the period 1827-1913.

It is often useful to convert nominal values to real values for applied welfare analysis. This article discusses the use of price deflators, and several published economic indices that may be useful for this process.

This paper compares various methods used for measuring price trends in sequential auctions and draws on index number theory. Data from wine auctions are used to show that different methods applied to the same data may lead to significantly different conclusions. Moreover the same method can even lead to opposite results depending on the way pairs are selected within the set of similar objects sold sequentially. Finally, the number of identical objects being sold also influences the price trend.