Taiwan's consumer prices edged up 0.11 percent in July from a year ago as costlier school fees offset declines in food prices, official data showed yesterday.
The consumer price index was down 0.30 percent from a month earlier largely due to lower prices for discount clothes, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics reported. Clothing prices dropped 5.6 percent in July from June as retailers offered discounts to attract customers.
In the seven months to July, the CPI was up 0.27 percent from the same period in 2000.
Meanwhile, the July wholesale price index fell 0.22 percent from a year earlier but was up 0.20 percent month-on-month, the directorate said. In the seven-month period, the wholesale price index slipped 0.06 percent.
The government is backing away from the word "deflation" even though economic figures indicate that commodity price growth has shown month-on-month drops in the past several months, Chen Chang-hsiung (
According to Chen, deflation would come about as the result of months of long downturns in price inflation and reduced demand for imports and domestic demand for exportable goods.
The slide in Taiwan's consumer prices diminished in July while the total amount of consumption by the private sector has not noticeably dropped from similar levels of the same month of the previous year, indicating that it is still too early to say that deflation is setting in, he said.
Therefore, unless international oil prices should surge substantially in the next few months, the rise and fall of the island's consumer prices will not be the focus of economic issues this year, Chen said.
"The typhoons and floods pushed up prices," said Fang Jeng-ren, an economist at President Securities Corp (
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