The Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) has incorporated since last January online gambling into the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), thus advancing in the measurement of prices linked to this activity.
Gambling was included for the first time in the CPI in 2017, with the change to the 2016 base. However, it has been since January of this year that online betting has become a specific part of the gambling section.
Statistics sources indicated to Europa Press that the integration of online gambling has been carried out by obtaining prices from the main betting houses through the technique of "web scraping", which consists of automatically extracting data and information from web pages.
In practice, this technique uses programs or "bots" that browse the Internet, capture the required content, and store it for later analysis.
The INE continuously reviews the coverage of the items included in the CPI, as happens with the sample of automobiles used to calculate inflation or with the different types of organized trips.
Statistics began to publish in January the CPI based on 2025. The most relevant novelty of this new base is the adoption of a renewed consumption classification, which makes the CPI go from 12 to 13 major groups.
A constantly evolving shopping basket
With this 2025 base, the shopping basket has been updated, the weightings have been revised, and various methodological adjustments have been introduced.
Along with online gambling, this year products such as avocados, blueberries, tea soft drinks, beer with lemon, and X-rays have been incorporated into the CPI, while others considered obsolete, such as the tie and the handkerchief, have been removed.
The 2025 base CPI introduces improvements in the process of collecting and recording prices. Until now, when a significant change in the characteristics of a product was detected in fieldwork, the adjustment was reflected in the calculation of the CPI the following month.
With the new system, and thanks to the widespread use of electronic devices in price collection, these adjustments are integrated in the same month in which the variation occurs.
Currently, the CPI is made up of 196 subclasses. Only those that exceed 0.03% of total expenditure remain; those that fall below that threshold are excluded.
With the 2025 base, several subclasses have been added, among them those of garden and camping furniture; caravans, motorhomes and trailers, as well as the rental of personal vehicles without a driver.
The modifications that the INE has been introducing in the composition of the shopping basket in recent years have been very diverse.
With the 2016 base, applied in 2017, products such as online video and music services ("streaming") or single-dose coffee were incorporated for the first time into the CPI, while others with less presence in consumption, such as brandy, video cameras or recordable DVDs, were removed.
In the change of base to 2021, which is carried out every five years, the most significant variations in the basket were the entry of hygienic masks and the subscription to the 'online' press. On the contrary, items such as the image player, the portable player or the compact disc, among others, disappeared due to their lower use.