TOKYO: Japan’s core consumer prices rose 0.4 percent from a year earlier in May, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said in a report on Friday. According to the ministry, the rise in prices in the recording period was due to an increase in prices for crude oil. The core consumer price index, which excludes fresh food prices because of their volatility, increased for the fifth straight month, according to the ministry.
Oil producers, including those belonging to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), stemming a global oil glut by reducing output drove up prices for crude, with the industry continuing to bear heavily on consumer prices in resource-poor Japan. However, the ministry’s data showed that excluding prices for fresh food and energy fees, consumer prices were essentially flat for the second successive month, owing to stagnant domestic demand as consumer and household spending remains stifled by sluggish wage growth.
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) this month decided to keep its monetary policy unchanged in a bid to shore up the economy and continue with its reflationary efforts, although the bank’s chief said that improving underlying inflation and expectations would take some time. “It is taking long to turn around Japan’s deflationary mindset because the country has been mired in deflation for a long time,” BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told a news conference recently. “People tend to act on the assumption that wages and prices won’t rise… But the job market is tightening further, so we will likely see that pushing up sales prices. We expect inflation to gradually accelerate ahead,” the central bank’s chief said following the conclusion of a two-day policy board meeting. The central bank raised its economic assessment and increased its real gross domestic product (GDP) growth forecast for the 2017-18 fiscal year to 1.6 percent from the 1.5 percent forecast in January.
“Japan’s economy has been turning toward a moderate expansion. Overseas economies have continued to grow at a moderate pace on the whole,” the BOJ said in a statement. The bank, however, lowered its core consumer price index (CPI) growth forecast to 1.4 percent from 1.5 percent in the same period, however. “The bank will continue with ‘quantitative and qualitative monetary easing, with yield-curve control,’ aiming to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent, as long as it is necessary for maintaining the target in a stable manner,” the central bank said. The core CPI for Tokyo’s 23 wards, which is widely seen as barometer of future price moves in the country as it’s released a month earlier than the nationwide data, was flat in June. The figure dropped from a 0.1 percent increase logged a month earlier, the latest data showed.
