Air fryers and vegan substitutes have joined the basket of common consumer goods and services used to measure inflation, while admission fees to nightclubs and the cost of a landline telephone have officially been dropped from the list.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Thursday published details of the latest updates to how it calculates the consumer price index (CPI). Rebasing of the CPI usually occurs every five years, in tandem with the household budget survey, but was delayed in 2021 due to the pandemic.
The basket of goods and services used to measure inflation now contains 612 items, with latest additions including air fryers, smart watches, wireless speakers and wireless headphones and disposable e-cigarettes (vapes).
Milk and meat substitutes have entered the basket for the first time, as well as non-alcoholic beer, rib-eye steak and spring onions – while gin has made a return to the list after being dropped in 2001.
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Meanwhile, the CSO has also removed a number of items from the basket – including admission fees to nightclubs, landline telephones and rail catering.
As people increasingly use their smartphones to listen to music and take photos and videos, the CSO has also removed MP4 players, digital cameras and photo printing from the list.
Other goods and services phased out from the basket include e-readers, playschools, stockbroker fees, newspaper advertisements, swiss rolls and midi systems.
Anthony Dawson, statistician with the consumer prices section of the CSO, said that the CPI basket is influenced by data from the household budget survey, as well as what items are becoming less popular and increasingly difficult to price (such as landline telephone contracts and digital cameras), and changing consumer trends.
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“It’s a combination of the household budget survey which is a very important, rich source of data for what we add, but also our own judgment as well,” he said.
The CSO has said that as it moves to more continuous collection of the household budget survey, the CPI basket of goods and services could potentially be updated on an annual basis in future.
The weightings of some items in the basket have also been adjusted today, as the weighting for spending on restaurants, cafes, fast food and takeaways has increased, while less importance is now placed on spending in licensed premises (bars and pubs) – as Mr Dawson noted that the proportion of consumer spending in pubs has fallen from around 6 per cent to 3 per cent.
The weighting of spending on rents and mortgage interest has also decreased, as the weight given to the prices of electricity, gas and home heating oil has increased.
Weightings in the CPI basket are updated annually based on national accounts data on household expenditure, supplemented by more granular data in the household budget survey.
The CSO has also announced that the new base period for the CPI is December 2023, with all CPI figures going forward, starting with January 2024 figures released on Thursday, published under the base period of December 2023=100.
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