Abstract

The basic basket is a public statistic of paramount importance in Brazil, because it measures the purchasing power of the less affluent population. Food consumption fully directs the spending of Brazilian families and any price variation influences the amount consumed or the exchange of brands. The Intersindical Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies is the agency that measures this phenomenon in Brazil, performing face-to-face and monthly price collections in commercial establishments. However, due to resource constraints, this index does not reach the entire Brazilian geographic coverage and limits the number of establishments. In this sense, this article aims to overcome this difficulty by adopting a new method of data collection. The proposal is to calculate the price of the basic basket from prices collected on e-commerce sites, through web scraping, implemented through the R Selenium package. Data were collected in 17 cities in Brazil during the period of one year. The results are promising and demonstrate that the method is a good substitute for the traditional format.