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Underlying Inflation in Australia: Are the Existing Measures Satisfactory?

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  • Robert Dixon
  • Guay Lim

Abstract

Along with a number of other central banks around the world the Reserve Bank of Australia has quite explicitly adopted an inflation target. Both the Bank and the Australian Government’s statistical agency (the Australian Bureau of Statistics) report various measures of the underlying rate of inflation. The aim of this paper is to formulate criteria which an acceptable underlying rate must satisfy and then test to see whether either individually or in combination any of the current (CPI Excluding volatile items; CPI Market prices excluding volatile items; Weighted median and; Trimmed mean) or recently discarded (the Treasury underlying rate) measures of underlying inflation satisfy these criteria. We find that for the period since inflation targeting began (in 1993) none of these underlying series satisfy all of the criteria we propose but that one series (the RBA’s Trimmed mean series) does satisfy the sub-set which we refer to as our ‘necessary criteria’. We then examine the results of an ‘Unobserved Components’ decomposition and argue that it provides useful information on underlying inflation in Australia. JEL Codes E31, C4 Keywords:

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  • Robert Dixon & Guay Lim, 2003. "Underlying Inflation in Australia: Are the Existing Measures Satisfactory?," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 878, The University of Melbourne.
    • Handle: RePEc:mlb:wpaper:878
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    Cited by:

    1. Ivan Roberts, 2005. "Underlying Inflation: Concepts, Measurement and Performance," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp2005-05, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    2. Na Guo & Bo Zhang & Jamie Cross, 2020. "Time-varying trend models for forecasting inflation in Australia," CAMA Working Papers 2020-99, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    3. Bhattacharya, Rudrani, 2024. "How did Transition to the GST Regime Affect Inflation in India?," Working Papers 24/405, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
    4. David Shepherd & Robert Dixon, 2008. "The Cyclical Dynamics and Volatility of Australian Output and Employment," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 84(264), pages 34-49, March.
    5. Jamie Armour, 2006. "An Evaluation of Core Inflation Measures," Staff Working Papers 06-10, Bank of Canada.
    6. Na Guo & Bo Zhang & Jamie L. Cross, 2022. "Time‐varying trend models for forecasting inflation in Australia," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(2), pages 316-330, March.
    7. Liam J. A. Lenten, 2010. "Bananas and petrol: further evidence on the forecasting accuracy of the ABS 'headline' and 'underlying' rates of inflation," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(6), pages 556-572.
    8. Lei Lei Song, 2003. "The Role of the Unit of Analysis in Tax Policy Reform Evaluations," Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series wp2003n29, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne.
    9. Lei Lei Song, 2005. "Do underlying measures of inflation outperform headline rates? Evidence from Australian data," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(3), pages 339-345.
    10. Rachel Holden, 2006. "Measuring core inflation," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bulletin, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, vol. 69, pages 1-7, December.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inflation Monetary Policy Time Series Econometrics;

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • C4 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics

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