A Network Analysis of the United Kingdom’s Consumer Price Index

Georgios Sarantitis (), Theophilos Papadimitriou and Periklis Gogas

No 1-2016, DUTH Research Papers in Economics from Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we model the United Kingdom’s Consumer Price Index as a complex network and we apply clustering and optimization techniques to study the network evolution through time. By doing this, we provide a dynamic, multi-level analysis of the mechanism that drives inflation in the U.K. We find that the CPI-classes’ network exhibits an evolving topology through time which depends substantially on the prevailing economic conditions in the U.K. We identify non-overlapping communities of these U.K. CPI classes and we observe that they do not correspond to the actual categories they belong into; a finding that suggests that diverse forces are driving the inter-relations of the CPI classes which are stronger between categories rather than within them. Finally, we present a reduced version of the U.K. CPI that fulfills the core inflation measure criteria and can possibly be used as an appropriate measure of the underlying inflation in the U.K. Since this new measure makes use of only 14 out of the 85 U.K. CPI classes, it can be used to complement the Bank of England’s arsenal of core inflation measures without the need for further resource allocation.

Keywords: Network Analysis; Threshold-Minimum Dominating Set; community detection; core inflation; consumer price index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 E31 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2015-09-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-mon
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2882172 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Network Analysis of the United Kingdom’s Consumer Price Index (2018)
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:ris:duthrp:2016_001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DUTH Research Papers in Economics from Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Economics Department of Economics, University Campus, Komotini, 69100, Greece. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Periklis Gogas ().