Consumer Price Inflation across the Income Distribution in South Africa

By monitoring the price changes experienced by some representative household, consumer price indices provide an important measure of changing purchasing power within a given economy. Group price indices offer one method of more accurately reflecting the inflation experiences of specific types of households, such as poor households, elderly households or households with children, for example. This study uses expenditure data from the 2000 Income and Expenditure Survey and price indices from Statistics South Africa to calculate inflation rates for expenditure deciles for the period 1998 to 2006. As a result, price indices and inflation rates calculated on the basis of these weights can not accurately reflect the rates of inflation experienced by what would be viewed as the ‘average’ household.