Effects of weather conditions on prices in Korea

Seunghee Lee

KDI Journal of Economic Policy, 2025, vol. 47, issue 4, 131-158

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of unexpected changes in weather conditions on inflation in Korea. Using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model, we analyze how changes in temperature and precipitation influence price dynamics across different components of the consumer price index (CPI). Our empirical analysis reveals that unexpected changes in weather indices induce significant volatility in fresh food prices and exert direct impacts on consumer inflation, with precipitation changes contributing more substantially to short-term price increases than temperature variations. The effects are particularly pronounced during summer. However, core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy components, remains largely unresponsive to weather indices. Through a regression analysis examining the interaction between headline and core inflation, we find that consumer prices tend to revert to core inflation levels, suggesting that weather-induced price fluctuations have limited medium-term impacts on the underlying inflation trend. These findings indicate that while weather changes may increase short-term price volatility through agricultural supply disruptions, monetary policy responses to such temporary fluctuations may be ineffective. Accordingly, alternative policy measures focusing on supply diversification and climate resilience should be prioritized.

Keywords: Climate Change; Inflation; Monetary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E52 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/335565/1/1949890864.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:kdijep:335565

DOI: 10.23895/kdijep.2025.47.4.131

Access Statistics for this article

KDI Journal of Economic Policy is currently edited by Dongseok Kim

More articles in KDI Journal of Economic Policy from Korea Development Institute (KDI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().