- Summary:
- The best inflation indexes record a number of different benchmarks and incorporate additional data points.
Like the wind, inflation is invisible yet everywhere. We can’t see it, yet we feel its effects every time we fill up at the pump, shop for groceries, or apply for a mortgage. Inflation – the rate at which the price for goods and services in an economy rises over time – leads to a decrease in purchasing power. The same amount of money can buy less goods than it once could, in other words.
Monitoring inflation isn’t just about watching your spending power decrease: it’s a valuable benchmark that can be used to gauge the performance of an economy, make smarter investment decisions, and assign savings and disposable income efficiently to mitigate inflatory effects. It pays to track inflation since its ebb and flow influences every other aspect of the economy from housing to jobs and from manufacture to stocks.
It’s one thing to appreciate the value of accurate and comprehensible inflation data. It’s another knowing where to find it. Many national governments, banks, and financial organizations publish regular inflation data, which is a good place to start. But ideally, to access data that is unbiased, up-to-date, and transparent, you should consult an independent inflation index. The following five indexes, comprising a mixture of governmental and independent platforms, are all worth a closer look.
Truflation
Truflation provides independent financial data with a particular focus on inflation. Its inflation indexes make it easy to track inflation in real-time for three key countries: the US, UK, and Argentina. This is particularly useful for nations such as Argentina, where inflation runs high and government data can’t always be trusted. The ability to view inflation over specific time thresholds makes it possible to gauge how it affects the price of goods and services in real terms. Truflation’s particularly good with measuring housing inflation, having pioneered an improved methodology that’s claimed to be more accurate than existing solutions.
One of the neat things about Truflation’s dashboards is that they also include things like Big Mac indexes, tracking the price of the hamburger in dozens of countries over time. As Truflation explains, “By analyzing the cost of a Big Mac in various countries, economists and analysts can gain insights into currency valuation and disparities in living costs.” Other useful tools include a personal inflation calculator that can be used to measure the real impact of inflation on your personal expenses.
Trading Economics
Trading Economics publishes inflation data for hundreds of countries and includes multiple benchmarks and inflation measurements. The layout of its inflation dashboard makes it easy to compare the inflation rate in different countries, while a useful map contains hotspots of countries where inflation is particularly high. This is helpful for getting the big picture on global inflation and pinpointing regions where macro forces are pushing inflation higher than normal.
The Trading Economics dashboard contains tabbed sections covering various continents as well as the G20, making it easy to zero in on regions of interest. Data is updated monthly with the increase or decrease in inflation cited in percentage points. While more granular data for each country would be nice, the Trading Economics platform is helpful for getting an overview of global inflation.
Financial Times
The Financial Times provides a good inflation and interest rate tracker that makes it easy to perform a side-by-side comparison of different countries. It uses the CPI, overlaying it with central bank data that shows the approach different countries are taking to address inflation. A dropdown menu makes it easy to view data from hundreds of countries, from Oman to the US.
There’s also a useful chart that shows how different nations have adjusted policy to mitigate inflation through raising, lowering, or maintaining interest rates. Other valuable charts include an interactive overlay of CPI data for the UK, US, Eurozone, and Japan, as well as charts covering house prices, government bond yields, and an animation of how inflation gripped the world following the Covid pandemic.
World Bank
The World Bank provides an inflation database that provides a wealth of data going all the way back to 1970 and which covers 209 countries. It’s an extremely useful aid for researchers trying to access comprehensive inflation data and contains six measures of inflation and three frequencies, recording annual, quarterly, and monthly levels.
While the scope of the World Bank’s inflation database is impressive, it’s not the easiest to parse since it’s only accessible in spreadsheet form. Moreover, since it’s only updated twice annually, it’s a lagging indicator that doesn’t reflect the latest inflation data. Nevertheless, for serious analysts who are comfortable with crunching raw numbers, the database is a rich trove that includes such metrics as food, energy, core, and producer inflation as well as a gross domestic product deflator.
Office for National Statistics
The UK’s Office for National Statistics publishes a regularly updated inflation dashboard that’s centered around consumer price inflation (CPI). The CPI measures the average change over time in the prices paid by consumers for a basket of goods and services such as food, housing, clothing, transportation, and healthcare.
It also includes an inflation calculator for determining how the cost of living affects households directly. This is complemented by a series of indexes for tracking the CPI over time. Useful as the Office for National Statistics’ service is, its greatest shortcoming is that it’s only focused on the UK, making it of little value to citizens of other countries.
From the Consumer Price Index to the Producer Price Index, which tracks changes in the prices that producers receive for their goods and services, there are many ways to measure inflation. The best inflation indexes record a number of different benchmarks and incorporate additional data points that can also impact the rate of inflation. If you’re trying to track inflation in your country, pick an index that’s easy to read and regularly updated, allowing you to make more informed financial decisions.