Headline inflation and Philippine commodity prices

PSA all-items Consumer Price Index. Measured as its month-on-month change, so a move here is a month of inflation. This page lists every Philippine commodity price whose monthly changes measurably track it, the delay between the two, and how much of the move carries through.

Headline inflation is an index or rate rather than a price, and it can sit near or cross zero. Percentage changes in a series like that are unstable, so the figures below are best read as direction and timing rather than as a “10% move produces X” rule.

The strongest link currently measured is Rice (Regular-milled) (Retail (PSA)), which moves with headline inflation with a correlation of +0.55 at a lag of same month, measured over 102 overlapping months.

How this is measured

1. Both series are bucketed to monthly and converted to month-on-month percentage change, so a slow-drifting price level cannot manufacture a correlation.
2. The commodity's monthly change is regressed on the driver's change at every lag from 0 to 12 months.
3. The lag with the strongest correlation is kept; ties resolve toward the shorter lag.
4. The link is labelled strong, moderate, weak or none from the correlation and its p-value together — strong requires a correlation of at least 0.5 at p < 0.01, moderate at least 0.3 at p < 0.05.
5. Pairs with fewer than 24 overlapping monthly observations are excluded from every ranking on this site, however strong they score. With thousands of comparisons run each night, thin pairs clear a significance test on noise alone.

Other drivers

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