Get an overview of the most noticeable price changes for selected goods and services.
If you want to know how the prices of all product groups have developed please refer to our price kaleidoscope.
If you want to know by how much your personal inflation rate differs from the official one, just test our "personal inflation calculator".
The World Cup – the international football competition contested by the senior men's FIFA national teams – kicks off on the 14th June. 32 teams are aiming to win the title over the course of the next 4 weeks. The smallest participating country is Iceland, with slightly more than 330 000 inhabitants. The largest country taking part is Brazil, with a population of over 207 million people.
If you look at the number of men each country has to offer within the classic football age bracket (15- to 34-year-olds), Brazil is in a good position: In 2017, approximately 35 million men aged 15 to 34 lived here. In Germany, the corresponding figure for 2017 was just 9.7 million. So far, Brazil has won the cup five times, whilst Germany was successful on four occasions. But of course past competitions show that population figures are not exactly the decisive factor in this context: Spain won the World Cup in 2010 with only 4.8 million men in the key age group.
Our special World Cup feature offers a direct head-to-head comparison of all participating countries in terms of economy, population, labour, sport and communication. And the data include a few surprises: Costa Rica, for instance, is top of the league in terms of mobile phone contracts per inhabitants. If it space to kick a ball you are looking for, then Australia and Iceland are the countries with the best conditions: Population density amounts to just 3 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to 526 in Korea. You also have the opportunity directly compare two countries competing in a match.
The EU Commission has referred Germany and five other countries to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) because air pollution levels are too high in many cities and regions. Germany has especially broken limits on levels of nitrogen oxides. Even though, according to provisional calculations, pollution caused by road transport declined by 42.4% between 2005 and 2016, the relevant EU limits are still exceeded.
Compared with the overall situation, nitrogen oxide emissions from private cars (vehicles of households) decreased slightly less by 40%. The situation is different regarding particulate matter: while emissions from private vehicles declined by 42.7%, road transport emissions as a whole decreased by no more than 37.2%. In addition, the CO2 balance of households (7.4% reduction) was better than the overall situation which was even characterised by a 3% increase in CO2 emissions (excl. biofuels).
Against the background of the diesel scandal, it is worth looking at the emissions from private diesel vehicles: in 2016, they accounted for 39.8% of the CO2 emissions of households in road transport, for 77% of nitrogen oxide emissions and 18.7% of particulate emissions. Detailed results of road transport exhaust emissions will be published in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Frequent online shoppers will notice that the prices of some products change within short time intervals. This type of price-setting behaviour is referred to as dynamic pricing. Roughly 10,000 online prices are collected for consumer price statistics each month. Is it still possible for consumer price statistics to capture the representative price development and to take into account dynamic pricing?
In their article on Dynamic pricing as a challenge for consumer price statistics, published in the 2/2018 issue of our WISTA scientific journal, Christian Blaudow and Florian Burg report on the results of a study conducted in 2017 to examine the price-setting behaviour of online shops. Using web scraping, a technique for the automated collection of online prices, the study monitored products included in the consumer price index sample. It was found that web scraping is a sensible and efficient method to expand online price collection in future and to help ensure the quality of consumer price statistics.
