How did the weights in the Swiss inflation gauche evolve over time?

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During the last year the topic of inflation rates around the globe gained traction. Opening up the newspaper one is often confronted with quotes reporting sky-high inflation rates:

USA:

The annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 9.1% in June of 2022, the highest since November of 1981, from 8.6% in May and above market forecasts of 8.8%. 

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

EU:

Euro area annual inflation is expected to be 8.9 % in July 2022, up from 8.6 % in June 2022.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained

Switzerland:

Annual inflation rate in Switzerland increased to 3.4% in June of 2022 from 2.9% in May, and beating market forecasts of a 3.2 percent rise. It was the highest inflation rate since October 1993

https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/inflation-cpi

Naturally, the question arises of how the different reported increases between the regions and countries compare to each other. Since I reside in Switzerland I want to deal first with how the inflation is actually measured here.

Inflation index in Switzerland

The most famous measure to gauche inflation in Switzerland is the so-called LIK which stands for “Landesindex der Konsumentenpreise”. In my view it is comparable to the term consumer price index (CPI) used in the USA. It basically measures the development of prices for household’s relevant goods. General information can be found here.

Weight evolvement

To understand which categories contributes which part to the LIK, I downloaded the LIK weights from the bfs here. In the upper plot you can see the different weights per year e.g. for the year 2022 “Living and Energy” was the most biggest weight with 26.595%. You can select between the years 2000 and 2022. In the lower plot you can see how the weight for the selected category evolved over the time period between 2000 and 2022 e.g. we can see that the “Living and Energy” had a minimal weight of 24.747% in 2016 and then started to rise again.

Most notable weight changes

The above chart allows to inspect the weight evolution of the different categories in the Swiss inflation gauche of the last 22 years. There are some notable things to mention here. Firstly, the category Restaurants and hotels oscillated between 9.5% and 8% for a very long period only to drop to 6.5% and then 6% in the year 2021 and 2022 as shown below. Clearly the Corona pandemic must be the root cause here and reflecting the different spending behavior of the Swiss inhabitants.

Also very instructive is to note that while some fundamental categories' weights like health or living and energy became greater over time some less fundamental categories like "Leisure and culture" dropped over time as shown below. At that point I am not clear whether this change reflects a volitional change in people's behavior to spend less on leisure and culture or whether this is a forced shift in weight due to the increased costs of the more fundamental things. If the latter is true, this could actually imply a loss of prosperity or living quality so to say.

Please note if you are interested in how the graph above was created, you can check out the public finspresso repo on Github.