Some Thoughts on the Housing Component of the Consumer Price Index

The past two decades were a turnaround as far as inflation concerned. For the first time in Israel’s history, it enjoyed “price stability”. In 2003, the government set the inflation target at its current level of 1–3 percent, and though the inflation rate stayed within this range in only five of the next fourteen years, the average annual inflation rate since then was well within the target (1.2 percent). The combination of the modest pace and the small number of “hits” reflects the considerable volatility of price changes of the consumption basket. No component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) contributed more to this volatility than the housing price component, measuring the cost of housing “services” (as distinct from the “Dwellings Price Index” index which measures that of the “assets”).1 As Figure 1 shows, whereas in the first 3 years, 1999–2002, the housing price component rose 1.6 times faster than the total CPI for those years, in the following five years, it sank at an annual pace of nearly 2 percent, and was the main reason for the modest CPI inflation in those years. Since then, the housing price component rose 2.5 times more rapidly than have the other components of the CPI, boosting the weight of housing in the basket from 21.4 percent in 1999 to 24.7 percent in 2016.