The Manual’s primary aim is to provide a general understanding of the basic principles underlying the ICP and how such an understanding can improve the efficiency of its implementation and the management of its operations. To this end, the Manual serves both as an operational guide for planning, coordinating and monitoring of the implementation of the program, and provides reference materials and step-by-step guidelines for price surveys, covering household final consumption, government expenditure, and capital formation. It also gives guidance to the compilers of expenditure weights and offers them a useful tool to validate their data.

This Operational Manual is a companion to the Handbook: it does not attempt to replace it, but to complement it: it translates theory into practice, by describing the procedural rules and the practical methods of obtaining all the data required for this vast global program. It is therefore primarily addressed to ICP practitioners, whatever their role, from the army of price collectors in the majority of countries around the world, to the national ICP coordinators and the regional and global levels of ICP coordination and calculation. There is inevitably a degree of overlap between the two documents.