Assessing shrinkflation and inflation by income groups in the German HICP

forthcoming

On-site data collected for CPI/HICP production offer an excellent opportunity to examine the extent and frequency of changes in package size / content. The effects of product relaunches with product size changes in the sample of on-site price collection of products in COICOP 01 and 02 – which are mostly in the focus of media coverage regarding shrinkflation – will be examined. The analysis will be extended to drugstore articles in different COICOP divisions and to other goods/services that might be subject to shrinkflation or similar changes in size or content. The vast amount of data collected with the integration of retailer scanner data into the German CPI/HICP is a chance to develop methods to measure inflation by income groups. The amount of data is linked to chances in this field, as it makes additional information available, but also brings its challenges as there is the need to divide the data to different groups automatically. Overall the project will help to improve the data collection methods and the process of producing the HICP-results.