Inflation across the globe

We have done a number of blog posts on inflation and other economic indicators using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.  However we know the world (and Domo’s user base) goes beyond just the United States so we went in search of data to help tell the broader global story of inflation.  Luckily, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collects this inflation information on many countries and cross-national organizations.  They also have a shared the data through an organized API framework called SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange) meaning we can use Domo’s Jupyter Workspaces integration to automate the process of bringing the data into Domo (Code for loading this data can be found here.  Credit to McWayne Mumford for getting this working for me).

One of the bigger questions we have explored in the past is whether inflation is finally getting better (lower being better in this case).  The map below gives us a snapshot of what direction inflation is going based on the latest month of OECD data.  As of this writing (numbers will continue to update so you can come back here and check), we can see that many countries have seen inflation getting better (Russia not being one of those but if you hover on the map you can see that the latest data is from March 2022).  We can also see that overall inflation is much higher in Europe than in the smaller G-7.

We also can use this data to go deeper on one specific country.  For example below is the data defaulted for Japan looking at inflation back to 2017.   While inflation is still going up in Japan, it is significantly lower than in the United States or Europe.  You can go ahead and switch to a different country as needed or look at additional years or a different measure such as Food.

We will continue to explore these OECD and other global data sources to ensure we keep a global perspective in this space.