Research group says Turkey’s consumer inflation was over 142 percent in March

Founded by a group of academics and announcing alternative inflation rates in Turkey, the Inflation Research Group (ENAG) estimated that Turkey's monthly consumer inflation rate was 11.93 percent and its annual inflation rate was 142.63 percent in March 2022.

ENAGrup Consumer Price Index (E-CPI) increased by %11.93 in March, 2022

E-CPI increased by %142.63 in the last 12 months.

— ENAG (@ENAGRUP) April 4, 2022

ENAGroup has observed that the prices declined in the bundles of Hotels, Cafes and Restaurants by 1.41 percent while a sharp increase was experienced in Health by 78.44 percent in March 2022:

Shortly after the ENAG shared these figures, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), which is responsible for producing official statistics on Turkey, released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for March 2022 and indicated that the monthly consumer inflation rate was 5.46 percent percent and the annual consumer inflation rate was 61.14 percent in March.

About Inflation Research Group

The Inflation Research Group (ENAG) was established by a group of academics with the aim of announcing the inflation rates in Turkey on an hourly, daily and monthly basis. The group aims to momentarily calculate the inflation data by momentarily following the changes in exchange rates, interest rates and share prices at the stock exchange.

The ENAG announced its first data in September 2020. According to this announcement, the monthly inflation rate was 3.61 percent while the TurkStat announced the same rate as 0.97 percent.

There are 418 items in the index of the TurkStat and the ENAG's index has 314 of these items, which accounts for 80 percent of TurkStat's index. The remaining 104 items are not included in the calculation by the ENAG on the grounds that they do not have a significant effect on inflation and do not completely reflect the consumption behaviors.

However, in order to enable a comparison with the TurkStat's inflation rate, the price changes in these 104 items are taken from the TurkStat and added to the inflation rate calculated by the ENAG as the remaining 20 percent. So, while the items' index and weights are handled in the same way as the TurkStat, there are differences in measurement and methodology.

TurkStat was previously criticized for adding or excluding certain items in calculating the inflation rate. (SD)