Do price controlled basic food items affect inflation in Fiji?

Authors

Joel Abraham, Fijian Competition and Consumer CommissionFollow
Akeneta Vonoyauyau, Fijian Competition and Consumer CommissionFollow
Seema W. Narayan Prof., Monash UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This note examines the effects of price-controlled perishable food items on inflation in Fiji. We study year-on-year changes in headline inflation and disaggregate measures of inflation in the form of food and non-alcoholic beverages and vegetables against three perishable food items used daily by Fijian households, namely, potatoes, onion, and garlic over the period 2019:01-2022:08. We also follow Narayan et al (2023), allowing for the lags and leads framework in examining Fiji’s inflation. Our results show that the leads and lags model explain 22%, 27% and 65% of headline, food and non-alcoholic beverages and vegetables inflation rates, respectively, over the period 2019-2022. However, as expected, none of the price-controlled perishable food items can explain Fiji’s inflation.

Recommended Citation

Abraham, Joel; Vonoyauyau, Akeneta; and Narayan, Seema W. Prof. (2023) "Do price controlled basic food items affect inflation in Fiji?," Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking: Vol. 26: No. 4, Article 4.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59091/2460-9196.2120
Available at: https://bulletin.bmeb-bi.org/bmeb/vol26/iss4/4

First Page

607

Last Page

616

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Country

Australia

Affiliation

Monash University