Rosstat announced how the basket was changed to evaluate consumer inflation in 2021. Its adjustment is the routine annual procedure, but this time the basket fell on 36 products and services immediately (556). Added medicines, antiseptics, masks, new medical and digital services, such as carcharing. Something Rosstat deleted from the basket - the goods whose share in consumption was so small that it was too expensive to track the prices of them, - push-button mobile phones, fur hatches, carpets.
It should be said that the annual revisions of the consumer basket are not always limited to the simple inclusion or exception of goods - the statistical office can significantly change the nature of the tracking position, updating its characteristics. For example, in 2020, Rosstat seriously modernized the description of the smartphone - used with its inclusion in the basket in 2014, morally outdated, so that the model suitable for Rosstat did not coincide with the changed tastes of consumers.
At the moment, as far as we know, such descriptions for 2021 are not published, as the new structure of the scales in the basket is not published, including the first positions included.
What is the pure effect of expanding the list of observed goods and services? First, the main goal is to synchronize the structure of the inflation index with the structure of our actual expenses. Secondly, the extension of the basket will significantly reduce the cost of tracking price changes.
Will it change qualitatively dynamics and inflation? You can answer with a significant share of confidence - no. Price volatility and their level determine - the structure of consumption in a generalized sense (mainly the share of food products) and the structure of types of outlets (share of large networks and online sales against other forms of trading).
In the first case, the overall pattern is to reduce the effect of price volatility for the general index as the share of volatile food prices decreases. In the second case, regularities are less well-established, but general hypothesis is more flexible pricing in online trading compared with the physical retail, which leads to greater variability of prices and their more quick response to the change in supply and demand.
What changes could fundamentally affect the nature of inflation in our country? In my opinion, you need to remember two types of changes. The first of them is stated by Rosstat - the beginning of using alternative data, namely data of cash registers when calculating the price index. The agency will have to solve objectively complex applied tasks to bring the cass data to the same form as the traditional surveys collected - first of all, you need to learn how to accurately recognize the commodity positions. International experience says that this task is a set - so the statistical service of the Netherlands announced in January 2020 that the "field" price observations are completely discontinued and the service will use data of the cash technology and web scraping sites of retail chains. How the index behavior will change after turning on new data sources, will be more seriously dependent on how this data is processed and used to enrich the traditional sample of Rosstat.
The second change concerns the systematic inclusion of housing prices into the inflation index. Today, the sum of both types of rent (one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments) is 0.78% of the entire basket - this is somewhere in importance between sausages and sausages (0.75%) and one of the types of macaroni (Vermicelli is 0.8%). Because of this, as well as due to the low volatility of the rental cost, it is extremely rarely discussed - especially in the context of monetary policy, rates management. Attention to this segment is referred to only with sharp changes. The rental weight used by Rosstat fully complies with our principles for calculating the structure of the basket - based on cash payments. These principles are not the only in international practice. For example, a number of large countries take into account the imputed rent - the rental price that the resident would pay if he had rented his own apartment, and almost all countries, including Russia, take into account it when calculating GDP. The inclusion of imputed rent is part of the approach to the ECB policy, launched in 2019 and put on the pause of Cake. At a minimum, the analysis of the possibility of updating the approach to accounting for housing prices should be in the Rosstat agenda, if we want to be sure that we remain at the forefront of statistical practices.
The author's opinion may not coincide with the position of the VTIMES edition.