The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggregation of the CPI over 1990–2021, and compares the properties of this measure to those of standard core. For quarterly data, we find that the weighted median is less volatile than standard core, more closely related to economic slack, and more closely related to headline inflation over the next year. The weighted median also has a drawback: in most countries, it has a lower average level than headline inflation. We therefore also consider a measure of core inflation that eliminates this bias, which is based on the percentile of sectoral inflation rates that matches the sample average of headline CPI inflation.

中文翻译：

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全球加权中值通胀：衡量核心通胀的指标

核心或基础通胀的标准衡量标准是不包括食品和能源价格的通胀率。本文利用 1990 年至 2021 年 CPI 子类别级别分解，为 38 个发达经济体和新兴经济体构建了另一种衡量标准，即加权中值通胀率，并将该衡量标准的属性与标准核心的属性进行了比较。对于季度数据，我们发现加权中位数的波动性低于标准核心，与经济疲软的相关性更密切，与明年总体通胀的相关性更密切。加权中位数也有一个缺点：在大多数国家，它的平均水平低于整体通胀。因此，我们还考虑了一种消除这种偏差的核心通胀指标，该指标基于与整体 CPI 通胀样本平均值相匹配的部门通胀率百分位。