If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists. There i

If you think about what they are actually trying to measure, it should also be clear that the primary goal of these statistics is to employ economists. There is the raw price data, which is mostly bunk because it uses unrepresentative products. And there is obviously huge political pressure not to make basket adjustments that result in prices going up. And then there are quality adjustments that are completely nonsensical. Worst example is obviously with something like medicine where it just isn't possible to compare the price of drugs that save lives that didn't exist fifty years ago. Unfortunately, economists will forever be in the camp of not understanding the difference between what is measured and what can be useful (and this has serious consequences for policy, for example the understanding within modern economics of long-term economic growth is close to zero which has led to policies focusing heavily on resource usage/intensity, essentially no different to North Korean economic policy in the 50s, due to significantly understated long-term estimates of growth). Hong Kong's government didn't produce economic statistics during its period of rapid growth for this reason.