RETAIL PRICES INDEX - RPI

One of the two main measures of consumer inflation produced by the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics. The Retails Price Index (RPI) was introduced in the U.K. in 1947, and was made official in 1956. Like the better-known Consumer Prices Index (CPI), the RPI tracks changes in the cost of a fixed basket of goods over time, and is produced by combining about 180,000 price quotes for over 650 representative items. However, since the introduction of the CPI in 1996, 12-month inflation in the U.K. has generally been about 0.9 percentage points higher when measured by the RPI, as compared to the CPI.