{"id":809196,"date":"2025-01-29T07:32:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-29T05:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=809196"},"modified":"2025-01-29T07:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T05:32:09","slug":"important-changes-to-south-africas-inflation-basket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/809196\/important-changes-to-south-africas-inflation-basket\/","title":{"rendered":"Important changes to South Africa&#8217;s inflation basket"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>South Africa will add ros\u00e9 wine, snuff and e-cigarette refills to its inflation basket and remove frozen potato chips and condensed milk to better reflect the nation\u2019s fast-changing shopping habits.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;\">In a periodic review, South Africa\u2019s statistics age<\/span>ncy lowered the weight of housing in the basket of goods used to calculate the consumer price index to 24.1% from 24.5%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even so, it remained the largest category, followed by food and non-alcoholic beverages, whose weight was increased to 18.2% from 17.1%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Patrick Kelly, chief director of price statistics, said the exercise did not result in revisions to previously published consumer price index data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOne of our objectives with this update is to try to improve the alignment between the CPI and the national accounts, in particular, the household final consumption expenditure component,\u201d he told reporters on Tuesday in Pretoria. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cVaping has become quite popular over the last number of years as an alternative to cigarettes, so we are including these.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The shake-up will also see the list of items the agency surveys drop to 391 compared with 396 and the reclassification of five indexes, including the addition of one new one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Other Changes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Transport\u2019s contribution drops to 13.9% from 14.4% of the basket<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Fuel is now 3.9%, down from 4.8%<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The statistics agency last overhauled the inflation basket in 2022. The changes will be introduced in January\u2019s inflation release on 19 February, with December 2024 as the new reference period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The annual rate of inflation last month was 3%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Certain items will also change classification. Some food products will be shuffled between groups, and insurance and financial services will get their own category with a weighting of 10.4%. They\u2019re moving from the miscellaneous goods and services index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The overhaul takes effect after a meeting of the central bank this week, which is expected to cut the benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point to 7.5% when it delivers its policy decision on Thursday.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Officials will weigh their assessment against the backdrop of lower oil prices and a roughly 4% depreciation in the rand against the dollar since their last meeting in November.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Analysts expect inflation to stay below the 4.5% midpoint of the central bank\u2019s target range, where it prefers to anchor expectations, until at least mid-year.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>South Africa is changing the basket of goods it uses to measure inflation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":669109,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[7530,3619,853,5769],"class_list":["post-809196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-inflation","tag-sarb","tag-south-africa","tag-statssa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809197,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809196\/revisions\/809197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}