Seyfettin Gürsel, Melike Kökkızıl ve Selin Köksal
Turkstat’s inflation consumption index (CPI) reflects in fact the changes in the value of the representative household’s consumption basket based on market prices. However, inflation faced by households which belong to different income and expenditure groups may differ since the composition of their consumption basket differs widely comparing to the basket of the representative household. In this research brief, different price indexes are calculated for each income quintile from the poorest to richest by using consumption data from the Household Budget Surveys (HBS) released by TurkStat for the period December 2003 – April 2016. The results indicate that poorer households faced higher inflation rates than richer ones during the last eight years. Inflation difference between poor and rich households increased by 3.3 percentage points compared to December 2014 and the cumulative difference reached 21.4 points since December 2003. This inflation gap against poor households is originated mainly by significant increase in food and housing-water-heating prices.
doc. ResearchBrief194
pdf. ResearchBrief194