The consumer price index (CPI) rose 1.7 percent year-on-year last month, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
However, the mild advance in inflation masked a big increase in the cost of food, with vegetable and fruit prices soaring 16.78 and 15.18 percent respectively from a year earlier, the agency said.
Food costs, which comprise 25 percent of the CPI, grew 4.47 percent last month, lifting the inflation measure by 1.25 percentage points, or 73.5 percent of the increase, the agency said.
While people consume vegetables and fruit daily, they are not included in the core CPI calculation due to volatile price movements, allowing the overall reading to register a benign increase.
“Stripping fruit and vegetable prices out, the increase in CPI would have eased to 0.82 percent,” DGBAS Deputy Director Tsai Yu-tai (蔡鈺泰) said, dismissing concerns about rising inflation.
People with low and middle incomes felt the pinch more acutely than the CPI figures suggested, after transportation and communications costs rose 2.57 percent, driven by a 15.4 percent jump in fuel prices, the highest since May 2010, Tsai said.
The seasonally adjusted CPI declined 0.11 percent last month, but rose 1.4 percent for whole of last year, the highest in four years, Tsai said, adding that a 5.24 percent increase in food costs pushed up the inflation measure.
The agency expects CPI to moderate to 0.75 percent growth this year due to a relatively high base.
The labor law amendment could add 0.3 percentage points to the CPI this month as firms raise prices more to digest the extra costs, Tsai said.
Meanwhile, the wholesale price index (WPI) returned to positive territory for the first time in 79 months last month on the back of a double-digit increase in the crude oil price.
The WPI — a measure of production costs — increased 1.41 percent last month, due to a recovery in the prices of chemicals, basic metals, minerals and crude oil, the agency said.
For the whole of last year, the WPI fell 3.01 percent from a year earlier, it said.
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