THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE INFLATION IN TURKEY

Yıl 2010, Cilt: 10 Sayı: 2, 613 - 625, 01.05.2010

Nazif Çatık A. Özlem Önder

Öz

This paper investigates distribution of inflation items using various measures of skewness and kurtosis for Turkey covering the period 1996-2007. Considering sensitivity of traditional distribution measures to outlying observations robust skewness and kurtosis are also computed as a novelty. Analysis results mainly reveal that inflation components are right skewed and fat tailed as documented by the previous studies. However due to possible effects of the outliers traditional measures, in particular skewness, are lagging behind the robust measures in identifying underlying dispersion. Therefore one can say that weighted mean inflation used to measure general price changes is not trustworthy and a biased estimator of central location. Our results further suggest that core measures based on constant and symmetric trimming applied by the previous studies for Turkey is somewhat deficient since skewness of the data is ignored in the estimation process. Therefore, to obtain more reliable information in monitoring general price movements we suggest use of asymmetric trimmed means estimators which allows trimming different percentages from each tail of the distribution

Anahtar Kelimeler

Inflation, Robust Skewness and Kurtosis

Kaynakça

• Atuk O. and Özmen M. U. (2009), "Design and evaluation of core inflation measures for Turkey," IFC Working Papers, No 3.
• Aucremanne, Luc (2000) “The Use of Robust Estimators as Measures of Core Inflation,” National Bank of Belgium Working Paper, No. 2.
• Berkmen P. (2002), “Measuring Core Inflation for Turkey Trimmed Means Approach,” , 2002, 2 (2): 1-18.
• Bowley, A.L. (1920), Elements of Statistics, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Bryan, M. F. and S. G. Cecchetti (1993), “The Consumer Price Index as a Measure of Inflation,” Economic Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Vol. 29/4, pp. 15-24.
• Bryan, Michael F., and Cecchetti, S. G. (2000), „„A Note on the Efficient Estimation of Inflation in Brazil,” Banco Central do Brasil Working Paper, No. 11.
• Bryan, M.F. and Pike, C.J. (1991), “Median Price Changes: An alternative approach to measuring current monetary inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of
• Cleveland Economic Commentary, December, pp. 1-4. Cecchetti, S.G., (1997), “ Measuring short-run inflation for central bankers,” Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 79, number 3, 143-155.
• Crow, E.L. and Siddiqui, M.M. (1967), "Robust Estimation of Location,'' Journal of the American Statistical Association, 62, 353-389.
• Groeneveld, R.A. and Meeden, G. (1984), "Measuring Skewness and Kurtosis,'' The Statistician, 33, 391-399.
• Huber, Peter. J. (1981), Robust Statistics, New York: John Wiley and Sons.
• Kucuk, H and Tuger, B. (2004), “Relative Price Variability: The Case of Turkey 2002”, Central Bank of Turkey Research Department Working Paper, No:04/02.
• Kearns, J. (1998), “The distribution and Measurement of Inflation”, Reserve Bank of Australia Discussion Paper, no. 9810.
• Marques, C. R. and Mota (2000) “Using the asymmetric trimmed mean as a core inflation indicator,” Banco de Portugal Working Papers, No. 6 (October).
• Moors, J. J. A. (1988), "A Quantile Alternative for Kurtosis," The Statistician, 37, 25
• Roger, S., 1997. A Robust Measure of Core Inflation in New Zealand, 1949-96.
• Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Rousseeuw, P. J. ve Leroy, A. M. (1987), Robust Regression and Outlier Detection, New York: John Wiley and Sons.