Philippines

We have added alternative measures for core inflation compiled by central bank staff. 

The trimmed mean represents the average inflation of the year-on-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) components, excluding the highest and lowest 15 percentiles. The weighted median is defined as the middle inflation based on a cumulative CPI weight of 50 per cent in a lowest-to-highest ranking of the year-on-year CPI components.

As the chart highlights, core inflation rose to record levels – close to eight per cent at its peak in March 2023 – due to significant increases in a few CPI components, which affected the overall metric. All three measures are now relatively close, in the three to 3.5 per cent range. 

South Africa

We have added a number of surveys from BankservAfrica, including the Economic Transactions Index (BETI) and the Take-Home Pay Index (BTPI). 

The BTPI index highlights trends in South African salaries, while the BETI index is an early economic scorecard index, which can be used as a leading indicator for economic growth.

In the chart below, we displayed the BETI index versus the South African headline GDP series. Correlation is around 0.7 when the BETI index is pushed forward by two months. As of now, it suggests that there will be stagnant economic growth in Q2 2024.

World

The “Freedom in the World” publication has been added to Macrobond. This addition covers 195 countries and is built around one overall score and two main categories: civil liberties and political rights. 

A detailed methodology documentation is available {{nofollow}}here. 

In the bar chart below, we have displayed the main changes to the overall index over the past five years (2020 – 2024). The left hand side lists the countries with the largest drop in overall score, while the right-hand side tracks the countries that made the most progress.