Statistics Insights: Inflation is an interactive publication produced by the European Central Bank and the national central banks of the Eurosystem. The publication aims to make it easier to understand, use and compare euro area and national statistics. It presents the statistics visually, catering for colour blindness, uses reader-friendly terms, is digitally reusable via the embed function and is available in 23 EU languages.
Information on data
The data are updated in real time and available from the Statistical Data Warehouse.
The inflation data are produced by Eurostat, together with the national statistical institutes, and are available here.
The data for the second chart in Section 3.1 and the charts in Section 3.2 are produced by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs and are available here.
Disclaimer
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the work and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction (with the exception of the personal inflation calculator that cannot be used for any commercial purpose, including distributing, sublicensing and/or selling copies of original or modified code), including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions.
The software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind.
In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the Software or the use of or other dealings in the Software.
The Software is built upon and made available by Eurostat and Lietuvos bankas. See also the Eurostat Disclaimer and the Terms of use of Lietuvos bankas.
The ECB/Eurostat/Lietuvos bankas take no responsibility for any replication of the content of the Software, or any other form of redistribution.
Cover photo © monticello, Xsandra, guenterguni, Rost-9D, scanrail, SergeiKorolko/iStock
Chapter 2.2 photo “Antique refrigerator” © jgroup/iStock
Chapter 2.2 photo “Modern household refrigerator with control display” © Grassetto/iStock
The European System of Central Banks (ESCB) is committed to providing its statistics free of charge as a public good of high quality irrespective of any subsequent commercial or non-commercial use. All publicly available ESCB statistics may be reused free of charge on the condition that the source is quoted (e.g. “Source: euro area statistics”) and that the statistics (including metadata) are not modified.
Nationale Bank van België/Banque Nationale de Belgique
Prices for the HICP are collected in different ways: manually in shops, in the form of surveys, or electronically, via large supermarkets and “do-it-yourself” shops (in the form of scanner data), or directly from websites.
When prices are collected manually in shops, a single product is selected (for example a 500g packet of ground, caffeinated coffee, of the brand “Sunshine”) and its shelf price in a certain supermarket, bakery shop or other outlet is recorded and tracked month by month. This method allows the prices of certain products to be collected as samples (for example, the price of ground, caffeinated coffee is collected, while prices of coffee beans or capsules may not be collected). Where scanner data are available from supermarkets, “do-it-yourself” shops and/or pharmacies, a much greater amount of purchase data can be collected.
The shopping basket and product samples are not permanently fixed. Goods and services remain in the shopping basket as long as purchases of them are significant, and for at least one calendar year. In almost all cases they remain in the basket for longer than that. The quality of products in the basket can also change: a new model of a refrigerator may have better energy efficiency, or a new computer model may have a faster processor. Since inflation measurement supposes that products are identical over time (basket of the same products), quality improvements are estimated and, subsequently, removed from the price index.
Product samples and their weights in the basket are updated once a year to take into account the evolution of spending patterns and to include any new products or outlets. Over the longer term this means that developments in the HICP are not only the result of changes in the prices of the same goods and services, but also reflect changes in consumption and shopping patterns.
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