Consumer price index for Germany
The consumer price index for Germany (CPI) is a price index of the average percentage change in the price level of certain goods and services that private households buy for consumption purposes . The price change compared to the previous year results from the comparison of the current index level with the index level of the previous month. The starting point for this consideration is always the respective base year (currently 2015) in which the shopping cart was created. The current weighting scheme for the basket of goods is published by the Federal Statistical Office under the title "Weighting scheme for the base year 2015". The Federal Statistical Office also publishes time series on the consumer price index from 1948 on the Internet and from 1991 as an online database with a diagram. Monthly publications for the current year are made on the website of the Federal Statistical Office. The legal basis for the collection of official statistics is the law on price statistics and the relevant implementing regulations .
Usually every five years a new consumer price index with a new base year is introduced. This regular revision is based on adjustments to the weightings as well as the systematic revision of the survey catalog and changes to the methodology . As a result, the consumer price indices of different base years, which are linked to form long series , can only be compared to a limited extent.
calculation
formula
The calculation in Germany is made using the Laspeyres index :
with = prices for the reporting year, = prices for the base year, = consumption for the base year.
Shopping cart and weighting of the output categories
| COICOP code |
Categories of goods |
|---|---|
| CC01 | Food and non-alcoholic beverages |
| CC02 | Alcoholic beverages and tobacco products |
| CC03 | Clothing and shoes |
| CC04 | Apartment, water, gas, etc. a. Fuels |
| CC05 | Furniture, lights, devices, etc. a. Household accessories |
| CC06 | Health care |
| CC07 | traffic |
| CC08 | Messaging |
| CC09 | Leisure, entertainment and culture |
| CC10 | Education |
| CC11 | Accommodation and restaurant services |
| CC12 | Other goods and services |
| component | 1995 | 2000 | 2005 | 2010 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Food and soft drinks | 13.1% | 10.3% | 10.4% | 10.3% |
| 02 Alcoholic beverages and tobacco products | 4.2% | 3.7% | 3.9% | 3.8% |
| 03 Clothing and shoes | 6.9% | 5.5% | 4.9% | 4.5% |
| 04 Apartment, water, gas etc. a. Fuels | 27.5% | 30.2% | 30.8% | 31.7% |
| 05 Furniture, lights, devices, etc. a. Household accessories | 7.1% | 6.9% | 5.6% | 5.0% |
| 06 Health care | 3.4% | 3.5% | 4.0% | 4.4% |
| 07 traffic | 13.9% | 13.9% | 13.2% | 13.5% |
| 08 Messaging | 2.3% | 2.5% | 3.1% | 3.0% |
| 09 Leisure, entertainment and culture | 10.4% | 11.1% | 11.6% | 11.5% |
| 10 Education | 0.7% | 0.7% | 0.7% | 0.9% |
| 11 Accommodation and catering services | 4.6% | 4.7% | 4.4% | 4.5% |
| 12 Other goods and services | 6.1% | 7.0% | 7.4% | 7.0% |
| Source: Federal Statistical Office | ||||
The starting point is the so-called shopping cart , which contains all the goods and services that are currently most frequently bought by consumers. The selection of specific products for price monitoring is continuously determined in the form of representative samples and kept up to date. More than 300,000 individual prices for these products are therefore collected every month by price collectors in stores and through centralized price records e.g. B. determined on the Internet or in mailing catalogs. The individual goods in the shopping basket are then assigned to around 600 goods groups and the average price development is calculated for each type of goods. The COICOP classification, as used by Eurostat and the United Nations, serves as the basis for the classification into groups of goods . The classification summarizes the goods groups in three hierarchical levels to form larger categories in order to provide an overview of the price development in differently detailed sub-areas of private life. The top hierarchy level is divided into twelve categories of goods.
To calculate the overall rate of price increases, the price developments in the individual groups of goods are weighted using the so-called weighting scheme . This breaks down how much households spend on average for a type of goods and thus ensures that each group of goods is only included in the overall price index with the proportion of expenditure to which it is entitled. In contrast to the shopping cart, the weighting scheme is only updated every 5 years. The most important sources for the recalculation of the weighting scheme are, in addition to the sample income and expenditure, the statistics of the current economic accounts and data from the national accounts. This basic information is supplemented by the analysis of further official and unofficial sources in order to enable a detailed breakdown of the expenditure on the individual types of goods. In addition to the weighting scheme for goods and services, weighting schemes for business types and federal states are also used to calculate the consumer price index.
The price development in the consumer price index is given as an index number with reference to a base year (currently 2015), which is valued with 100 points. The overall index was 107.4 in 2016, 102.1 in 2011 and 70.2 in 1991. However, individual groups of goods can develop very differently. So z. For example, from 2010 to 2016 the prices for the CC 02 category , alcoholic beverages and tobacco products, fell from 100.0 to 116.0 points, while the CC 08, messaging category fell from 100.0 to 90.3 points.
This sometimes very different development of the various groups of goods is one of the reasons why the inflation perceived subjectively by many people often deviates significantly from the inflation objectively recorded in the consumer price index. The Federal Statistical Office dealt with the subject of perceived inflation in special studies.
In Germany, the consumer price index is determined using the Laspeyres index . When the prices of various goods increase to different degrees, the index tends to overestimate the true increase in the cost of living. This can be attributed to the fixed shopping cart, because goods that are becoming more expensive can possibly be substituted by other goods . For European purposes, the Federal Statistical Office has been calculating a harmonized consumer price index (HICP) for Germany in addition to the consumer price index for Germany since 1997 .
Index from 1991 to 2019
| year | CPI | per year a) |
HICP | per year a) |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | 70.2 | |||||
| 1992 | 73.8 | 5.1 | ||||
| 1993 | 77.1 | 4.5 | ||||
| 1994 | 79.1 | 2.6 | ||||
| 1995 | 80.5 | 1.8 | ||||
| 1996 | 81.6 | 1.4 | 76.2 | |||
| 1997 | 83.2 | 2.0 | 77.3 | 1.5 | ||
| 1998 | 84.0 | 1.0 | 77.8 | 0.6 | ||
| 1999 | 84.5 | 0.6 | 78.3 | 0.6 | ||
| 2000 | 85.7 | 1.4 | 79.4 | 1.4 | ||
| 2001 | 87.4 | 2.0 | 80.9 | 1.9 | ||
| 2002 | 88.6 | 1.4 | 82.0 | 1.4 | ||
| 2003 | 89.6 | 1.1 | 82.8 | 1.0 | ||
| 2004 | 91.0 | 1.6 | 84.3 | 1.8 | ||
| 2005 | 92.5 | 1.6 | 85.9 | 1.9 | ||
| 2006 | 93.9 | 1.5 | 87.5 | 1.8 | ||
| 2007 | 96.1 | 2.3 | 89.5 | 2.3 | ||
| 2008 | 98.6 | 2.6 | 91.9 | 2.8 | ||
| 2009 | 98.9 | 0.3 | 92.1 | 0.2 | ||
| 2010 | 100.0 | 1.1 | 93.2 | 1.1 | ||
| 2011 | 102.1 | 2.1 | 95.5 | 2.5 | ||
| 2012 | 104.1 | 2.0 | 97.5 | 2.1 | ||
| 2013 | 105.7 | 1.5 | 99.1 | 1.6 | ||
| 2014 | 106.6 | 0.9 | 99.9 | 0.8 | ||
| 2015 | 106.9 | 0.3 | 100.0 | 0.1 | ||
| 2016 | 107.4 | 0.5 | 100.4 | 0.4 | ||
| 2017 | 109.3 | 1.8 | 102.1 | 1.7 | ||
| 2018 | ||||||
| 2019 | 1.4 | |||||
| a) relative change | ||||||
Web links
- Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): consumer price index - monthly values, annual averages and changes to the previous year
- Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): Articles on the subject of "Prices" from the journal "Wirtschaft und Statistik"
Individual evidence
- ↑ Consumer price index for Germany - weighting scheme for the base year 2015. Federal Statistical Office, February 21, 2019, accessed on September 9, 2019 .
- ↑ Download consumer index long series from 1948. Federal Statistical Office, accessed on September 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Genesis Online Database: Consumer Price Index (including rates of change): Germany, years. Federal Statistical Office, accessed on September 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Consumer price index Germany press releases. Federal Statistical Office, accessed on September 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Legal basis for statistics / surveys on the subject of "prices" . At destatis.de , accessed on April 5, 2019
- ↑ Quality report | Prices - consumer price index for Germany. ( PDF , approx. 247 KB) destatis.de, January 4, 2018, pp. 10–11 , accessed on April 5, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c shopping cart and weighting scheme. (No longer available online.) Destatis.de, archived from the original on July 7, 2007 ; accessed on April 5, 2019 .
- ↑ Income and Expenditure Sample (EVS) - methodological explanations. Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), accessed on October 25, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): consumer price index - monthly values, annual averages and changes to the previous year. Retrieved January 22, 2018.
- ↑ Project to measure “perceived inflation”. In: STATmagazin. Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), accessed on March 20, 2012 .
- ^ Illing, Blanchard: Macroeconomics . 5th edition. Pearson, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8273-7363-2 , pp. 912 .
- ↑ Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): Harmonized index of consumer prices. Retrieved January 22, 2018.