The Pass-Through of Commodity Prices to Consumer Prices of Selected Products

This contribution analyzes the pass-through of various commodity prices to consumer prices of selected products in Austria. For this purpose, consumer price microdata for the period from 1996 to 2009 are mapped to the underlying disaggregated commodity prices. The duration and extent of the pass-through are found to vary considerably across products. While changes in crude oil prices turned out to have a quite substantial and quick effect on the consumer prices of super gasoline and diesel, the pass-through was rather weak for bread (bread rolls) and meat (beef steak). Of all products analyzed here, natural gas had the slowest price response, as its retail price is still partly government-controlled in Austria. Since the introduction of euro banknotes and coins in January 2002, the pass-through has increased significantly for most products under review, but we cannot infer a clear casual relationship from this result as other factors might also be responsible for the observed increase in the pass-through. In addition, the pass-through to retail prices is found to be stronger for cost hikes than for cost cuts for fuel and meat products (notably beef steak). This confirms the result of an asymmetric pass-through for fuel products found in earlier studies.