JAPAN DATA: The Bank of Japan said it plans to switch the base year
for the corporate goods price index to 2010 from 2005 as well as update
the basket of goods used for calculating CGPI and change the weighting
of items within the basket, effective in the summer of 2012. Reflecting
changes in Japan’s economic structure, solar batteries will be added to
both export and import CGPI, color TVs will be excluded from export
CGPI, and copier machines will be left out of both domestic and export
CGPI. Taro Saito, senior economist at NLI Research Institute, forecast
the y/y gain in the November CGPI would be lowered by 0.3 percentage
point to around +1.4% y/y after the revision. When BOJ adopted the 2005
base year for CGPI five years ago, y/y changes in CGPI were lowered by
about 0.7 percentage point.