Wholesale and Retail Inflation
▪ Inflation continued to cool in June with retail inflation coming in at a 77-month low of 2.1% and wholesale inflation registering a contraction after 20 months.
Wholesale Inflation
▪ It measures the changes in the prices of goods sold and traded in bulk by wholesale businesses to other businesses.
▪ Published by the Office of Economic Adviser, Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
▪ It is the most widely used inflation indicator in India.
▪ The base year of All-India WPI has been revised from 2004-05 to 2011-12 in 2017.
Retail Inflation
▪ Retail inflation, also known as Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation, tracks the change in retail prices of goods and services which households purchase for their daily consumption
Consumer Price Index
▪ It measures price changes from the perspective of a retail buyer. It is released by the National
Statistical Office (NSO).
▪ Four types of CPI are as follows:
✓ CPI for Industrial Workers (IW).
✓ CPI for Agricultural Labourer (AL).
✓ CPI for Rural Labourer (RL).
✓ CPI (Rural/Urban/Combined).
▪ Of these, the first three are compiled by the Labour Bureau in the Ministry of Labour and
Employment. Fourth is compiled by the NSO in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation.
▪ Base Year for CPI is 2012.
✓ Recently, the Ministry of Labour and Employment released the new series of Consumer Price Index for Industrial Worker (CPI-IW) with base year 2016.
▪ The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) uses CPI data to control inflation. In April 2014,
the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had adopted the CPI as its key measure of inflation.
