The consumer price index (CPI) last month showed a 1.82 percent rise from a year earlier, the lowest in eight months and below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food costs held relatively stable, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The inflationary gauge is likely to hover below the 2 percent level going forward, in the absence of major abnormal surprises, despite Typhoon Krathon earlier this month and the recent rise in international oil prices, DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) said.
“The crop damage wreacked by Typhoon Krathon is not as serious as that left by typhoons a year earlier,” Tsao said.
Photo: CNA
Food costs last month grew a moderate 3 percent, as fruit prices rose 17.37 percent, but vegetable prices decreased 4.21 percent and egg prices declined 15.49 percent, the DGBAS said.
The core CPI, a more reliable long-term price tracker because it strips out volatile items, increased 1.79 percent, virtually unchanged from one month earlier and affirming a stable consumer price trend, the statistics agency said, adding that the CPI value after seasonal adjustments gained 0.38 percent.
However, the public might still feel the pinch because dining out prices climbed 2.98 percent, rents increased 2.5 percent, and medicine and healthcare prices rose 2.61 percent from a year earlier, Tsai said.
Shelter prices also expanded 2.39 percent, attributable to more expensive home maintenance costs, as well as electricity rate hikes from April onward, while education and entertainment prices added 1.79 percent, DGBAS data showed.
The producer price index (PPI), which measures the price movements of goods from a seller’s perspective, shrank 0.33 percent year-on-year last month, owing to price corrections for international fuel, food and electronic components, the agency said.
In the first nine months of this year, the CPI grew 2.26 percent, while the PPI rose by 1.47 percent from the same period of last year, it said.
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
FORESEEABLE CONSEQUENCES: New technology always comes with new innovations by the iniquitous in exploiting users for financial gain or more nefarious ends Artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” say they can save users time and energy by automating tasks, but the growing power of systems such as OpenClaw is putting cybersecurity experts on edge. Powered by a wave of hype, OpenClaw today says it has more than three million users worldwide. The system allows users to create so-called agents, tools based on a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude, that can carry out online tasks. “We’ve moved from an AI you could talk with via a chatbot to an agentic AI, which can take action... the threat and the risks are
RSS