Press release No. 329 of 29 August 2019
Consumer price index, August 2019:
+1.4% on the same month a year earlier (provisional)
-0.2% on the previous month (provisional)
Harmonised index of consumer prices, August 2019:
+1.0% on the same month a year earlier (provisional)
-0.1% on the previous month (provisional)
WIESBADEN – The inflation rate in Germany as measured by the consumer price index (VPI) is expected to be 1.4% in August 2019. Based on the results available so far, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) also reports that the consumer prices are expected to decline by 0.2% on July 2019.
| Overall index / subindex | Weight | May 2019 | June 2019 | July 2019 | August 2019 1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| in per mill | in percent | ||||
| 1 Provisional figure. 2 Household energy and motor fuels. 3 Net rents and other rents. | |||||
| Overall index | 1,000 | 1.4 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.4 |
| Goods | 468.16 | 1.8 | 1.5 | 1.8 | 1.3 |
| including: | |||||
| Energy 2 | 103.83 | 4.2 | 2.5 | 2.4 | 0.6 |
| Food | 84.87 | 0.9 | 1.2 | 2.1 | 2.7 |
| Services | 531.84 | 1.2 | 1.9 | 1.5 | 1.6 |
| including: | |||||
| Rents 3 | 207.26 | 1.4 | 1.4 | 1.4 | 1.3 |
In August 2019, the harmonised index of consumer prices for Germany (HICP), which is calculated for European purposes, is expected to increase by 1.0% year on year and decrease by 0.1% on July 2019. The expected difference of 0.4 percentage points between the year-on-year change rates of the HICP and the CPI is due to a special methodological effect concerning package holidays in the HICP, which manifested itself already in July 2019 (for detailed information see “Methodological notes” at the end of this press release).
The final results for August 2019 will be released on 12 September 2019.
Methodological notes:
In August 2019, the year-on-year change rate of the HICP is expected to be markedly lower (0.4 percentage points) than that of the CPI. This is largely due to a special methodological effect regarding the HICP: the revised CPI results at the beginning of the year had to be included also in the annual adjustment of the HICP weights and resulted in a smaller weight of package holidays in 2019. As usual, the weights of 2018 were not adjusted. Specifically, in August the strong seasonal effect concerning package holidays affected the 2019 HICP to a lesser degree than the 2018 HICP.
As a consequence, the HICP inflation rate was higher in August 2018 than that of the CPI (2.1% as compared with 1.9%) because of the stronger impact of the high package holiday prices due to the larger weight in the HICP than in the CPI in 2018. Now the effect is reversed. As HICP and CPI weights are comparable in 2019, the high prices in August have about the same effect (see month-on-month rates), while the high level of the HICP in August 2018 (105.2 as compared with 104.5 for the CPI) results in a lower HICP inflation rate in July 2019 (base effect).
